Goodbye Blogger, Hello Static Markdown
BlogI have been looking for a new blogging solution for some time. While Blogger has served my needs initially, I was dissatisfied with it for several reasons:
- Too slow.
- A very limited set of minimalist (and free) themes.
- Modifying themes is cumbersome.
- No native markdown support.
- Lots of features and complexity I don't need.
First I created a new blog using WordPress but there too I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of features. In addition some of the features they offer you need to pay for, so I looked further.
Markdown #
I write most of my documentation in Markdown and decided I wanted to write my blog posts in Markdown as well. And hurray, such a blogging system exists: Jekyll; but after 20 minutes with Jekyll I was dissapointed yet again. The sheer volume of Jekyll's documentation and seeing how complex some of the example source code repositories have become, I gave up quickly. Agreed, you can create simple websites with Jekyll but all I wanted was a simple markdown blog in a Bootstrap theme.
Before deciding to evaluate yet another blog hosting option (http://www.ghost.io), I asked myself; how hard can it be?
Well, not hard at all as it turns out.
Stubbornly I rolled my own solution in a couple of hours, hosted on S3, deployed with Gulp, and composed entirely from static files.
Update 2019-01-19: I've since migrated to https://www.11ty.io and https://zeit.co
You can find the source code of this blog here.