For the first several years, in propria persona ran on Blogger. After I tired of the limits of that platform, I moved it to the hugely configurable and widely used WordPress platform, usually hosting it myself with various small VPS providers.

I still like WordPress (and use it professionally), but the complexity of managing it and making it fast, secure, and highly customized finally made me rethink the entire thing.

So, after building my personal site using Jekyll, I decided finally to move all of my several hundred posts off of WordPress (using a custom-written Python script to access the very nice WP REST API).

And although I still quite like Jekyll and the flexibility of Ruby, I decided on Hugo—mostly because Go is fast, but also because I liked its rather agnostic view of sections and structure—and even though I find its template language (which draws on Go underneath)… odd.

I then decided to host it with Netlify and Github, put Gulp and NPM at the front end (so I can use SASS, minify, etc.), and tied into Algolia’s hosted search system (plus a bit of Heroku and old-fashioned PHP to handle my contact form).

Everything can be tested locally then pushed into production on Netlify with git push.

Tweaks and customization are fun again. Even the limitations of static hosting are more interesting puzzles than frustrating barriers.

I recommend it—though only for developer sorts!