Choosing a Platform for this new site
I wanted to bring back from the dead my old website, which was running on an old version of WordPress. It probably got hacked, as one day I received a text from a friend, asking about the error message that showed up (instead of the stale content that hadn’t been updated for years)
I also wanted to move away from WordPress and was looking for alternatives. Via a blog post I read (yes, blogs still are a thing, it seems) I found Ghost which looked good. Instead of just diving straight into installing it, I decided to ask the collective wisdom of Twitter for suggestions.
2025-01-06: There used to be a link to twitter here, but somewhere in the last few years since I deployed my blog the twitter API changed/broke/whatever. I have therfore removed the content.
| Name | Votes |
|---|---|
| Hugo | 6 |
| Ghost | 2 |
| Eleven_ty | 1 |
| Jekyll | 1 |
| Drupal | 1 |
| Pelican | 1 |
| Wagtail | 1 |
| Middleman | 1 |
| Perun | 1 |
After a long amount of deliberation, I decided to try Hugo. Installation and setup was a breeze, writing in Markdown and storing things in Git are things I like. Originally I wanted to self host the resulting site, but after seening a lot of my colleagues recommending Netlify I decided to try that as well. Again, the setup was a breeze, including setting up and moving DNS to them.
The biggest time sink was selecting a template from themes.gohugo.io - I spent several hours downloading and trying templates. In the end I selected Casper-Two a port of Ghost template. I will probably have to make some changes to it, but for the moment it does what it needs to do.