This site has switched to Pure Blog
As I am typing this, this is what I see:
This site has switched to Pure Blog -- a new static, Markdown-first CMS. I had been running WordPress since this site's incarnation in 2017.
But there are several reasons why a static site makes much more sense for this particular site:
- Low volume posts
- I need speed, speed I say!
- I don't want to do maintenance on plugins and more
I want 'simple' software that generates static HTML files. Nothing is faster than static HTML.
I had dipped my toes just a little bit into SSGs and I had decided that this was way too complex.
Enter Pure Blog.
I closely follow Kev Quirk's blog and when I read he recently started his own blogging software, I took notice.
At 12:57 today I asked if there was a WordPress importer; at 17:00 there was a WordPress importer.
The ball was in my court.
At 19:14 I visited the Pure Blog GitHub page and at 19:26 I had everything up and running and migrated all my old WordPress posts. I am still a bit amazed by this; how quick and easy everything was.
After that:
- I changed my vhost to point directly to the Pure Blog folder
- I picked a theme
- Added just a little bit of custom CSS (to hide tags on the frontpage)
- Hacked the config to allow 1000 (i.e. all) posts on the frontpage (in the admin backend the max is 100)
And yeah, that is about it??
Even my feed seems fine: it is at least the exact same URL as WordPress: j11g.com/feed (I think, I might need to double check).
Learnings and next steps
- I want to learn/do more with Markdown. Pure Blog is a Markdown-first blog editor.
- Can I add post headers / social sharing preview images? Probably.
- Half this post was gone, and I had to retype it because I clicked away (I am very used to auto-save).
- Fonts, always the fonts. At some point, I will spend way too much time on this and fiddle with fonts.
- The old blog had comments (notice how I say old blog -- this is only an hour into this experiment). Comments were pretty much the only reason I kept a dynamic CMS. I need to look at Pure Comments but I already more or less decided I could live without comments here.
- Some images (not all) on old posts seem misaligned and captions are off. I'm pretty sure I can fix this.
- YouTube embeds don't work by the looks of it (don't mind that too much for now).
- What are the permalinks options? I need to look at these.
- I need to quickly edit a recent published post. I noticed I see my drafts first and need to search for published posts in the backend.
- I want the tags to be clickable in the admin interface: why else have them.
- Do I need or want stats? Another thing I had WordPress plugin for.
Probably some more things, but I really wanted to get a first post out!
Anyway: so far, so very good!
Pure Blog makes me very excited and happy for some reason. It is more or less how my brain works i.e. how I would design a CMS myself. But now I don't need to!
Who knows I might even switch over my daily blog at some point, now wouldn't that be something?
Pure Blog is Pure Joy!