Blogging...Then and Now

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a developer who went by the name of Jon. He decided it would be a grand idea to start a blog after college…and decided on WordPress. It was the thing back then, all the rage…and it seemed like a great idea to start learning PHP. Of course, as is the case with most nonprofessional blogs, new posts were written with less frequency as time went on, until the point where the developer let the hosting lapse and that was the end of it.

Fast-forward a number of years and I decided it would be a jolly good idea (you’ll have to forgive me dear reader, for the British phrase, as I’m currently watching As Time Goes By) to start up writing again; the reasons are unimportant and will likely be covered in a future post but that’s for another time… I thought about going back to WordPress but while I owned a series of domains, I wasn’t all that keen on getting into bed with another hosting provider. However, I’d recently switched to Fastmail and it provides the ability to not only store files but can also be used to host static websites.

After hearing about static site generators over the course of numinous episodes on the Stacktrace podcast, I decided to do a little bit of research. It seemed using a SSG provided the best of both worlds: the speed of statically generated files with the dynamism of a traditional CMS. Given the constraints of Fastmail’s file hosting (static files only), using a SSG seemed to be a perfect fit. I’ve no idea how I settled on Hugo but thus far it seems to be going well.

So there you have it, the backstory for this site and a tiny bit of history.

Note: This post is from my old site and was ported over into Micro.Blog when I consolidated from two sites into one. All of the migrated posts can be found here.