Within the community of Linux users and fans, there's a term called "distro hopping", which refers to the act of constantly jumping around between different distributions, or "distros", of Linux. A few examples of popular distributions are Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), or Fedora. Back in the days when I ran Linux on my desktop as my primary OS, I was very much guilty of distro hopping, having tried out pretty much all of the popular distros at least for a short while. These days I'm using a MacBook as my primary computer, and thus macOS as my primary OS, so I haven't been doing much changing around of my desktop environment, though I have undergone a few changes with my blogging platform over the past couple of years. So I guess you could say I've been blog platform hopping a bit :P
When I first got started with blogging, my website was originally running on WordPress. WordPress is great as a tool for blogging, but I found that for me personally, it wasn't worth the trouble. You see WordPress powers a lot of the internet. I usually see estimates that vary quite a bit, though they generally say that somewhere around 60-80% of all websites run on WordPress. I think it's safe to say that WordPress is the single most popular website platform for the time being. With this broad popularity comes some pretty great advantages: the tooling, support, and availability of up-to-date tutorials and how-tos for getting things done are all pretty stellar. If you want to do something with WordPress as your backend, odds are someone has already at least started it or you can string a few plugins together to get close to what you need. Is that ideal? Probably not, but if you're on a strict time or cost budget, or don't need much more than a simple company website and/or blog, then WordPress is a great option for you. However, being the most popular platform for websites comes with some drawbacks too. I found that I was constantly having to harden and monitor my site because of countless attempts to hack into it, sometimes causing my whole site to crash or making it difficult to tell which posts of mine were actually interesting and which were just being perused by curious script kiddies. I was also dissatisfied with the performance of WordPress. I was probably a bit overly picky on that one, as the performance was just fine for a blog for just me, with super low legitimate traffic, but it still bothered me. I had often considered building out a single page application to just use my WordPress site as a back end to the super fast SPA, but I'm not a huge fan of JavaScript and I get a bit tired of learning some new framework or tool every year because those JS people love to change their minds on what the cool new thing is. Alas, I came upon another solution: static website generation.
It seems to me like static websites made a bit of a comeback in the past couple of years. With the rise of things like GitHub Pages, I find that today there are almost more static site generators than there are full-blown CMSs. Thus, I turned here to solve my problems. Static sites are by no means unhackable, but they're certainly more difficult to compromise than a database-powered site. Not only that, but the performance is almost always better than that of a typical CMS which sometimes has to make multiple database requests in order to serve up a given page. Static sites aren't perfect either though, and they certainly come with their own drawbacks as well. I began using a tool called Jekyll, which as I understand is the tech powering GitHub pages. Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby. I myself know little-to-nothing about Ruby, or its tooling, so I always found the setup a bit clunky and difficult. I also found it a bit annoying that I needed to install a bunch of dependencies like ruby, bundler, and gem to be able to produce my site. These dependencies would go on to just take up space on my computer as I didn't use them for anything else. I didn't really want to get too much into the template engine syntax (I think it's liquid, but don't quote me on that) either, so I ended up just grabbing a pre-existing theme and making minor CSS edits to it. All in all, my site felt sort of generic to me, and certainly not a great showcase of my skills and knowledge. I think it's fairly obvious as well, as I made the switch sometime in late 2017, and had a stark decline in the number of posts I published throughout the rest of 2017 and all of 2018. I decided this needed to change though, so I had to make a choice: either figure out this ruby stuff and get comfortable with building my own unique site with a comfortable composing experience, or drop it altogether and replace it with another blogging platform. I went with the latter.
Initially, I was planning on just going back to WordPress. The writing experience in WordPress is excellent in my opinion, and I love being able to start a post, save it as a draft, and pick up from any device with an internet browser. I often like to start posts from my phone, usually as just a few bullet points or a couple of sentences to get some ideas in writing, and then elaborate on them once I've got a full keyboard at my disposal. With a static site, this is a bit more cumbersome, as I just have a series of files stored in a git repository, and I don't particularly enjoy trying to manage git repos from my phone. Upon setting up my old WordPress site for reuse however, I discovered that the new Gutenberg writing system from WordPress only supports a limited set of markdown syntax without the use of plugins. On my site, I couldn't even get any of the markdown to be recognized though, so all of my posts looked terrible in their published state. I don't really want to go back and rewrite all of them to use HTML, nor do I really want to bother with attempting to import all of them and verify that the styles are good, so I abandoned this idea. I wasn't thrilled about the maintenance headaches anyways, so I think it was a good choice for me.
With WordPress out of the picture again, I took a look at Pelican. Pelican, much like Jekyll, is a static site generator. Unlike Jekyll, Pelican is written in Python. I found this to be quite nice, as Python was the first real programming language I learned and used, and I had a bit of experience with Flask, so I was comfortable with the Jinja templating engine as well. Or so I thought. It's actually been about 3 years since I regularly used Python for anything more than simple scripts, so I quickly found it awkward to do anything meaningful with my templates. Seeing as I don't intend on becoming a full time Python developer, nor do I want to maintain any Python-related code for any reasonable amount of time, I ditched Pelican and moved on. Pelican seems great, and I have no complaints about it, but I'd prefer to use more tools that I use daily if I'm going to be needing to update my site even yearly.
For the past 2 years or so, my language of choice has been Java. Coming from a background of Python, PHP, and JavaScript, I found typed programming languages refreshing, and compiled ones even more so. I can have my errors checked before I even run my code? Excellent! I'm sure that using Java all day every day for the past 2 years has also contributed to my growing affection for it, as I at least tend to get comfortable with my tools and then don't particularly like to change them much. Since I still wanted to stick with static site generation, I took a look around for a Java-based static site generator. Luckily for me, I found JBake, which, at the time of writing, is still under active development. I was quickly able to put together a site using Thymeleaf as the templating engine, and leaving my posts as they are in markdown, with just a simple search and replace to fix some of the liquid syntax from the Jekyll blog. To be fair, I didn't know even a little about Thymeleaf when I first began, but I was very keen to learn it as it seems to be quite a popular template engine for Java-based websites. I'm glad I did too, as I quickly came to enjoy working with it, and it's been well-worth the investment since I've returned to working as a freelancer. I've landed at least 2 large contracts (large for me at least) so far where knowledge of Thymeleaf was a must. I happily made my own simple theme, that while currently a bit bland, offers me the opportunity to learn and experiment with tech that's more relevant to my career. I plan to spice things up a bit with the design while still maintaining the simplicity where possible, so keep an eye on this space :)
There's still one more problem I haven't yet discussed with static websites that bothers me a bit - the lack of interactivity. Naturally, since there's no database from which the contents of my posts are served, there's no way to search the posts. On my Jekyll site I had a clever solution that I unfortunately can't take credit for that involved searching through the site's XML feed, though it always felt like a bit of a hack, and a limited one at that, as if I implemented paging in my XML feed, then that would have needed a fair amount of refactoring. Another related issue was the inability to have a contact form. I previously just used a Google form to get around this, but again, it was an ugly hack that to be honest I'm never sure even worked. I have some ideas to get around these two problems, but nothing I've finalized yet. As soon as I come up with something, I'll be sure to publish a post about it though :)
To wrap things up, I just want to clarify that I think WordPress, Jekyll, Pelican, and JBake are all great solutions to a common problem. There's also nothing wrong with PHP, Ruby, Python, or JavaScript. My decisions to change my blogging platform of choice were based entirely on personal preference, and I don't want anyone to feel like I'm attacking their project or favorite tool or anything like that. I think there's enough tool-shaming in the developer community and it's completely senseless in my opinion. I'll save that rant for another blog post though. Until now, please feel free to reach out to me with your comments, questions, and suggestions. I'd love to hear from you!
