When I moved to Hugo last October I thought this site would stay there but it just wasn’t to be. I love the idea of Hugo but in practice it just doesn’t work for me so it’s back to a full content management system for this site.
What’s wrong with Hugo?
Hugo doesn’t work for one major reason: I’m creating and managing content and it is not a content manager. From reusing images to keeping up with taxonomies to linking between posts, Hugo simply doesn’t make actually working with this site easy.
While there are other reasons for what has happened to this site, one of the biggest reasons the content has gotten so bad these last few months is that I couldn’t find a Hugo workflow that really worked for me. This meant that I created 3 post stubs over the weekend and simply tried to fill them in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. As a result, posts became completely transactional and I found it difficult to maintain any theme or more advanced content.
Beyond writing, the workflow was even worse. When I tried to add a photo to one of my last Hugo posts I realized I had forgotten how and didn’t have time to learn it again. That was the final straw. It was time to move to something else.
That’s not to say that Hugo isn’t a great system. I’m just saying that, once again, Hugo didn’t work for me. If I was to spin up more static sites or landing pages I think Hugo or Astro is still perfect, but not for this.
Why WordPress (again)
When I moved to Hugo I said I was done with WordPress. To be honest I haven’t changed my opinion on the WordPress “community.” Instead I came back to it as it is a familiar tool and it is easy for me to actually create content.
I don’t need to be involved in WordPress beyond being a user and that’s just fine for me. With some distance between myself and WordPress, personally and professionally, using it as a tool is fine at this point. It still does some things well and one of those is managing the content of a blog.
Some notes on the site itself
So here I am, using WordPress as a tool and doing my best to do so in a way that is as simple as possible for me. I’m not building my own theme and I only have one very small plugin (to add a featured image to the RSS feed) that I wrote. I intend to keep it that way for the foreseeable future.
As for the rest: I’m using the WordPress.com Business Plan for hosting as it was the only thing that seemed to offer more than ~30k visits per month for a decent price (I signed up for a 3-year plan for $17.50/month). This is after shopping around numerous hosting options, including those from previous employers and many others. I even did trial runs of 3 and just found that, in the end, WordPress.com simply had the best deal for the price.
I am using some of the Jetpack features this time around as it makes managing the site easy without spending too much time looking for the “best” option of any specific feature.
For the theme I decided I didn’t want to build one myself, but I did want a theme that seems to have a future and isn’t built by a large company. I settled on Ollie by Mike McAlister because Mike has been around WordPress for a long time (we even overlapped with our time at WP Engine) and he seems to be working to make a sustainable product in a market that is dominated by large hosts.
As for the Ollie theme itself, it is the first theme where using the full site editor has worked for me. I was able to mold it into what you see here and I’m pretty happy with the results.
Now to write
So here I am. Back on WordPress not as any kind of work requirement or with any illusions that it is an ethical choice but because it works as a tool. Going forward I’m OK with that and, mostly, I’m just looking forward to writing more.