A few years ago I decided to host my blog in a static GitHub pages generated through Jekyll.
I had a bunch of really good reasons to do that. I sincerely believe that we often abuse dynamic sites these days, and that a personal blog is a use-case that can be perfectly addressed with a static site.
Why spend a huge amount of resources every time you load a site, if you can go through all of that once, and just serve the same result every time someone asks for it? I think platforms like WordPress are missing an opportunity to save lots of resources by pre-generating all the content that is not supposed to change in a site.
The only part of a website that could require some dynamic load in a blog is the comments section, which due to user’s interactions, would be potentially impractical to pre-generate every time someone adds a comment. And even in this case I have some ideas about it: the backend could save a copy of the generated comments section every time someone contributes, and keep it until there’s a new one.
There’s lots to be explored in this area and we don’t even need to give up many of the features that we enjoy on dynamic sites, but seems like there is no platform like that nowadays.
The process to write a post using Jekyll was cumbersome: it required to remember too many steps, I had to think about Markdown, git repositories, compiling Jekyll… It’s by no means a complicated process: for someone like me with a career in computer science, it’s really easy to understand. But it’s cumbersome.
Having to go through this whole process meant that I rarely wrote posts. And what’s the point of having a super-efficient blog engine if I don’t write posts at all?
WordPress, on the other hand, has a beautiful editor, with automatic draft saving, an actual UI to set up tags, attributes, images… God, even something as basic as the post date setting up automatically to the date when I publish my posts (this is something that I need to manually setup on Jekyll).
Another feature that I didn’t realize I was going to miss so much are statistics. For my Jekyll page I basically gave up to have any kind of stats. I had analytics through Cloudflare’s platform, but these were basically useless. Most hits came from search engines or web crawlers. I tried to use Google Analytics as well, with similar results; GAnalytics seems to be great but also too complex for a simple blog. WordPress analytics turn out to be an awesome noise filter and the ones that better represent actual people entering my site.
I figured I would be able to write blog posts «only for myself», and not care at all about who reads it. In practice the lack of feedback makes it extremelly unmotivating and even worse. Just knowing that someone got to open it and saw that I wrote something (let alone read it) is so much better.
The truth is that having a platform designed to write and manage posts is a frequently overlooked key benefit of a specialized tool like WordPress. Being able to code-less configure every aspect of my site, or change its appearance on the fly; as well as understanding the level of reader engagement and recognizing what you’re doing right or wrong.
Sometimes you need to lose something to appreciate what it’s worth. I still firmly believe in the benefits of statically hosted sites, but in the future I will be mindful of all the other needs I must meet.
Daniel Barca 