My site, PigPog, is currently a WordPress blog. That might have changed if you're reading this a while after it was posted. In which case, you can already see how it turned out, while I'm still back here in the 'overthinking' stage.
Why change? Isn't WordPress, at the very least, fine? Yes. Yes, it is. But for the kind of lots-of-photos layouts I was trying to do, it's become a bit of a struggle. So I'm planning to simplify. And if I'm going to Simplify, WordPress is just more than I need. And if it goes simpler, the site could be made simpler for me to work on, and faster to browse. And cheaper.
And geekier. I do like an excuse to play with geeky stuff.
What I Played With
The idea of a Static Site Generator made a lot of sense to me. Pile of text files on my Mac. Run a script. Out comes a pile of HTML. Upload it somewhere. Website.
I'd be working on local files, and end up with a simple, fast, static site. Ideal.
I tried Jekyll and Eleventy, and briefly Hugo and others. Jekyll seemed like the most promising option. It's been around a while, and it's popular, so there's a lot of information out there. Blog posts, Reddit posts, articles, YouTube videos, all explaining how to do things with it. Where to actually host the site seemed like the harder part, but Cloudflare Pages turned out to be a lot easier to get up and running than I thought.
After a couple of attempts and bit of of playing and reading, I had a test site set up, where I could edit a file, commit and push it to GitHub, and a couple of minutes later it would appear on a test site.
All good. It would be simpler, but I only wanted a home for some old posts, a place for blogging, and a bunch of nice simple links to point people to my stuff elsewhere, like Flickr and Mastodon.
OMG, What's This? LOL.
I noticed Merlin had a new URL in the show notes for Do By Friday. https://hotdogsladies.omg.lol. I wondered what it was, and had a look. Looked similar to sites like Linktree. But a bit more reading showed me it was more than that.
omg.lol. A suite of simple web services, as a bundle, for a very reasonable price. Along with the profile/links page, you get a now page, for what you're currently obsessed with; a pastebin; a purl service for short and updatable URLS. A status system, like a very simple microblog. DNS control over the subdomain you register. And there's more to come - new features coming up include charms to give to other users, and a proof system to demonstrate that you own other sites and accounts.
That all looked useful enough to me. The static profile page would do a lot of what I wanted. But I still really wanted somewhere to blog. And that's included too, in the form of weblog.lol.
It's still in beta at the time of writing, and it's pretty basic. But you write in Markdown, and it becomes a blog post. And there was an added twist that made it even better for me.
It can be connected to GitHub.
Now, I'm no programmer. I'd only just recently tried doing anything much with Git, and still wouldn't say I'm really comfortable with it. But while testing the idea of using Jekyll and Eleventy, I'd made enough use of it that creating a repository and committing then pushing changes to it, at least, seemed pretty easy.
So I followed the instructions, and added the Action to be run when there were changes. And it worked first time.
So now, I can have a local folder of Markdown files, and with a couple of buttons in my text editor (trying Nova at the moment, but VSCode does the same too) and about ten seconds later, the post or changes are live.
Magic.
So What Does That Mean for My Plans?
Not sure yet, tbh. What it might mean is that the whole of my site could be replaced by a simple profile page and a simple blog. Nothing significant would be lost. Photo sharing would move over to Flickr. The profile page would be a handy little page to send people to who want to know who I am and where my stuff can be found. And the blog would be for, well, blogging.
If I've done a little photowalk, and have some photos to share, they go on Flickr, in an album. If there's a bit more story to tell around them, there can be a blog post to go with them. If I just want to waffle on about dull stuff nobody really cares about except me, it can go here. Like this.
What Next?
The current step is getting these thoughts out there, just so they're somewhere, which helps make my brain see that there's something that has to be done. I'm doing that now. From your point of view, it's done.
Next, I'll continue with uploading things to Flickr, to fill in the big gaps from while I've been away. And I'll continue to tweak this blog a bit.
I'll also continue with copying old posts from my current WordPress site to here, using Flickr to host the photos.
Once everything important (by the limited standard of what's there) is moved, if all still looks good, and feels right, I can connect my domain to here, and add a couple of subdomains so the main things I actually use here are accessible from my own domain.
And at that point, it will be done. Turn off WordPress and stop sending them money. Send it to Flickr and Adam instead.
The Intended Result
Being honest, the result won't be better for people who are looking at my photos - it'll be a bit worse, really. But a lot more people are likely to see them. And it'll be a lot less work for me to do to get them out there, so it might happen more often. And if I'm posting more photos, I'll probably take more photos.