Somebody asked me why I did not build this site in WordPress instead of going with a pretty weird setup with Netlify, Hugo, Forestry, and Bitbucket. And the main reason is that I do not have time, I don’t want to manage Wordpress site, even if you run it somewhere fully hosted I still find it to be a mess.

Once the site is generated, I can forget about it, I don’t have to worry about my theme suddenly breaking, I don’t have to worry about any plugins suddenly breaking. It will just work. I just want things to work and I don’t want to think about them.

Sure there are not millions of themes to choose from, but then again most of the free themes are crap anyway. I want to focus on the writing and the content, and honestly Forestry solves that problem and when I click publish netlify will just happily rebuild the site. And if I want to change from Netlify, I just need to tell the new service “Here, get the data from this Git repo”. I don’t have to export the site, import all the posts and then make sure that my theme works. As long as I can run Hugo in some way, it will work.

When you have too many options for plugins, themes, and all the other stuff it is also easy to get carried away to spend your time on the plugins, code, and all the other stuff. I want something simple enough for me to focus on the writing.

Maybe it is also a reflection of how I’m trying to change the way I live my life right now, trying to get rid of all the less important things so I can focus on the things I care about. And honestly, messing around with my website from a technical standpoint is not something I care about or enjoy. So that means no Wordpress, no CMS, just a static site generator and some content.

I just want it to be fun and simple to write new content.