From Hugo to Ghost and back again

I can hear you all giggling. Ha ha very funny, Jack changed his blog again. I get it. Most normal people don't change blogging engines every month or two.

If I were a different person, Ghost would be the answer. It’s fast, looks good, and has everything I might need for publishing a nice blog. But I’m me, and I get twitchy when content is “trapped” in Ghost. I understand that I can always export some unreadable JSON and finagle it from there, but I can’t get comfortable with it. It’s not just the JSON, but the complex markup Ghost uses for content. Yuck. If only I could ignore it.

As good as Ghost’s post editor is, it ain’t Emacs. I always end up wishing I was writing in Emacs.

Also, and maybe most importantly, I prefer static websites. The arguments in favor of static websites are enough, but they aren’t why I want a static site. It feels better having a static website. The actual publishing part can be a pain in the ass (:::cough::, Hugo) but the results are worth it. A folder full of HTML files and some images, starting on my local drive and synced to a simple web server…mmmmm, yummy.

So, once in a while I get tired of dealing with Hugo or whatever and I spin up a Ghost instance or try something new (e.g. Kirby). That feels refreshing for a while, but I end up being uncomfortable and crawl back to Hugo.

Hugo bugs me. It seems like something breaks with my site after every update. But it’s fast, widely-used, and a nice, tidy, single binary. I like my theme, too, for once, so I think I’ll do this again, for a while. Just don’t touch anything.