So, yeah. As I mentioned yesterday, I moved the blog. Again.
Wait a second, I say that like I do this often but I don’t. It’s been 10 years since the last move. It’s just that I moved this blog 5 times in its 20 years and 3 incarnations.
As for why: I’ve been tired of the enshittification of Medium. For quite some time now.
Up until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure about the best replacement. My needs are simple, and my goal was to simplify this thing. Not depending on a 3rd party blog publishing platform was another goal. Over the years this blog has resided on a local PHP CMS, Drupal, WordPress, even SquareSpace before it landed at Medium. For better or worse, each solution was fantastic early-on, but then time passes and that ole “value-extraction cycle” hits. Voila: the afforementioned enshittification inevitably occurs. And I start all over again, lugging my posts over to something less enshittified. And I’ve learned that, given enough time, ALL things will suck despite the good intentions of platform founders (see: Twitter). It’s just a fact of life: every human endeavor eventually degrades. It’s like gravity.
So, what to do? Where else can I put my blog that won’t enshittify, or otherwise hit its suck cycle? The trick is not to avoid enshittification , my friends. No: you embrace the enshittification cycle, and make it work for you! Get on a platform early on, and just be ready to make the hop away once that ole suck cycle kicks in.
So where were we? Ah yes, options for new Blog move. Substack looked promising and I have many friends still using it, but it’s already enshitifying with tell-tale signs. Substack is mostly-obsessed with pushing your writing to newsletter subscribers, anyway.
So I looked at options in the self-hosted solution space. I really don’t wanna roll a Vercel instance or other high-maintenance thing for a stupid personal blog, and gone are the days where you could just self-host a CMS: Security ends up being THE ONLY thing you’ll do, instead of blogging. Almost nobody self-hosts anymore.
But then it occured to me: I already host julianwest.me on GitHub Pages, why not just put my blog over there too?
Turns out every decent dev already does this, via Static Site Generators. Nice! So I looked into the top 3 in this space: Ghost, Jekyll, and Hugo. They are the major SSGs for GitHub hosted blogs, and each one is fast and efficient with its own pros and cons. My requirements were: I want the ability to write in Markdown in whatever editor I have open (vim, vscode, notepad etc.), and be able to just git-push whatever markdown-blog-post.md file I save locally.
I went with (drumroll 🥁) Hugo. I moved the blog last weekend, and if you’re reading this then I was successful. 😉
What’s nice is I can just throw together a blog post in text editor and git-push it up, where I have a Github Action workflow doing the site-generator magic with my new Post. No muss, no fuss. Very demure, very CI/CD. 🤭
For more info on the new blog setup, click the Colophon link below at the footer of this article. Enjoy the new digs!
Quick note here for myself, to review Jon Yocky’s excellent The Hugo Markdown Crash Course so that I can back-format all of my old articles properly for Hugo.