Recently I’ve been interacting with Apple Help Books and, as a result, static site tools. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should migrate my blog over to a static site kind of thing. The current site is a WordPress blog, but I’m in no way using all the whiz-bang options available there.
What’s the site for, in the first place? I use it for two things, really. First, I have individual (static!) pages for things like privacy policies for software. Whenever I put something on an app store, the store wants a link to a support page and a link to a privacy policy, so that’s where I stick ‘em. Second, there’s the blog, which is where I do long-form thinking and complaining. It’s rubber duck debugging, but for life. As a bonus, because it’s a blog, my friends who don’t see me all that often can subscribe and get notified that I’m still alive and still thinking about stuff. Every once in a while, someone will comment on a post and that feels pretty good. I’ve received several good suggestions that way.
Hm. If I made it a static site, the notification and the reply capabilities might be tricky to implement smoothly.
If I made it a static site, I could stop paying WordPress. I’d still have to have hosting, though. The site resources would be a lot smaller, although since I’m not self-hosting the WP suite, I’m already insulated from having to keep MySQL patched and backed up, PHP patched, all the plugins patched, etc. Even so, simple is good.
Making it a static site, though, also means coming up with my own suite of templates and CSS and whatever assets. That’s work that I don’t especially enjoy and am not especially great at (life hint: those two things are related).
Unlike a corporate wiki, my website is not write-only memory, though. I do find myself going back through old posts and pages to remind myself of tools or activities and the like. So it’s probably also a good idea if I have the whole thing available offline, because it’s not like the electricity grid or the Internet are getting more reliable.
Still going to have to think about this, but I do think there’s some value in the static site approach. I’m just not quite sure if it outweighs the cost of migration.
If you make a static site I don’t get notified by email when you post.
And that is a real negative. I have been looking at how other folks publish their (static site) blogs and send out notifications and allow comments/discussion, and it seems to amount to just moving the complexity and system maintenance from PHP and MySQL over to some other bunch of (usually Python) scripts. Which doesn’t make me feel super-excited to go that way, honestly.