New Home for My Blog

By Anatoly Mironov

Hello World

Now I have moved my blog. chuvash.eu is a static site. I’ll share more details and insights later.

Update 2022-02-10

It has passed a few months since the move from Wordpress to a static site. Now it is time to summarize the insights.

Why I moved

Here are the reasons why I switched from Wordpress.com to a static site

  1. To be honest, the main reason was that I was curious about static sites.
  2. It appealed to me to have a fast and secure website (because there is no database that slows down or gets hacked).
  3. I finally got rid of the annoying ads from Wordpress.com. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate Wordpress.com, as a matter of fact, I sacrified some really neat functions (such as the comments and the community) when moving to a static, but on that later.
  4. It finally got free from the vendor lock-in. Now I have all my blog posts as markdown files in a git repository. I can build them to any static website or even consume as they are, no fiddling with a database (if it were a own hosted wordpress site). I find it also easier to collaborate on my blog posts since I can grant access to the git repository to people I want to work together with.
  5. Speaking of git, now I have real version history of my content, no more accidential deletions.

Well, there might be more reasons, but these are the most important ones.

What I use

Just to give you a picture of how my basic setup is:

  1. a private git repository hosted on Github
  2. Hugo static site generator
  3. an app on Nettlify, with a build pipeline triggered whenever I update the code in the main branch
  4. Custom domain - chuvash.eu, bought on loopia.se, but pointed to and managed on netlify.com
  5. an account on imagekit.io for storing images
  6. Google Analytics account
  7. Google Search Console account

Why this and why that

Here comes the reasoning around my technical choices. My blog - chuvash.eu - is just a hobby project - for the sake of community, I don’t have whether too much time nor money to invest in it. It should be secure, cheap, simple, fast and clean.

Why Hugo

There are a plenty of static site generators. I researched some of them and decided to give Hugo a go (pun initially not intended), because:

  1. It was reported to be the fastest. Indeed it is, a joy to compile a whole static site in seconds when working on it locally, and it is especially good when you know that the build time in the Free Level of Netlify is limited.
  2. Go is an interesting and concise language I would like to get acquainted with. (Un-)fortunately, there was nothing I had to do with Go, except one little adjustment to a template.
  3. Hugo is open source
  4. Hugo is simple, it does not provide a lot of (confusing) extra features, it is good at what it its core. For my needs - having a blog - it was just what I was looking for.
  5. Hugo was easy to install locally and it has a built-in server (nothing unique, but definitely a good thing).

Why Netlify

The whole point of going static is that you don’t have to depend on one provider only. I could have chosen Github Pages or something else, but I chose Netlify because:

  1. I have read good reviews from other guys who switched static sites. Why not to try it then?
  2. Netlify has a DNS feature, that was something I wanted to make my blogger life easier and be able to create subdomains when needed.
  3. Netlify has a generous Free Level (at least for now), that gives me free build minutes, automatic detection of mixed content (less secure http images)
  4. It gives me a free SSL certificate (Let’s Encrypt), also here, nothing unique anymore, but still.
  5. Integration with Github is awesome. Once authorized I could point to my repository and set up a build. Whenever the main branch is updated, a new build and publish gets triggered. Also, merge check on Pull Requests and a Site Preview (with a different url) is really sophisticated.
  6. Lambda functions seem appealing, although I have not used them on my blog, I definitely feel curious about them.

Why a private repo

First, I thought, it would be good to have a public repo for my site, but then I decided to keep it private (at least for now), because:

  1. I would like to work on my next blog post directly. I work in a separate branch and merge it to main when I’m done.
  2. I might have some very specific instructions in README that should not be shared publicly.
  3. There might be a need in future to “remove” pages but still keep them in the version history internally.
  4. I still don’t know which license to use for my content.

Migration process