jeffgeerling-com

Yes, SSG pipeline + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is way simpler than Drupal. But all you've done in bought on all the pain and compromise of having to think from an SSG perspective, and that created problems which you've already identified you'll figure out in future I'm suggesting 2 or 3 small self-hosted OSS tools, where one is a small hand crafted server that basically takes a markdown file, renders it, and serves it as plain HTML with a header/footer. This is more homogenous, fewer unique parts/processes, and doesn't have the constraint of dealing with an SSG. I remember my own personal pain from 2010 - 2016ish of managing Drupal and Joomla. I did exactly the same as you in 2016 and went all in on SSGs and in 2024, I realised all of the above. I feel like I wasted years of potential development time reinventing basic personal we

I'm already self hosting my own cookieless analytics, and before, I hosted Drupal (LEMP stack) and Apache Solr on separate servers. I'm used to self-hosting, and any comment solution I use will be self-hosted as well (see: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167) The code surface with SSG + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is much, much smaller than it ever was running Drupal or another CMS.

> If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamically generated from markdown. Until you have enough visitors or evil AI bots scraping your site so that it crashes, or if you're using an auto-scaling provider, costs you real money. The problem isn't in markdown→HTML conversion (which is pretty fast), it's that it's a first step in adding more bells and whistles, and before you know it, you're running a nextjs blog which requires server-side nodejs daemon so that your light/dark theme switch works as copy-pasted from stackoverflow. For blogs, number of reads vs number of comments or other actions that require a server is probably on the order of 100:1 or 1000:1, even more if many of the page loads are bots/scrapers. > SSGing your personal site is the first step to handing it over to 3rd party services entirely

D'oh! Tracking some issues like this on https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/175 - thanks!