Welcome

Years ago (like, stone-age-ancient-history-before-social-media-ago) I used to have a blog but I shut it down and eventually transitioned to social media platforms when they started to become a thing.

Over the years I have occasionally wished I had a blog again if only to have a place to put longer thoughts that don't fit comfortably on social media platforms, but I didn't really want to build my own blogging platform (like I had in the old days) nor did I really want to use a gigantic system like Wordpress.

I considered a static site generator, but when I looked into it a few times over the years, it seemed like they were primarily command line tools or scripts and folders of bare files and I didn't want to deal with that every time I went to post a rambling thought. Maybe I'd have been fine with it once I got something up and running, but I just never seemed to feel ambitious enough to start setting it up.

More than once I seriously considered going totally bare-bones and actually just editing HTML pages manually if only to avoid having any tool dependencies, but I didn't like the idea of dealing with a mess of hundreds of bespoke HTML files someday in the future if I decided to migrate to something more structured.

Then I ran across Publii which has a really nice GUI that runs locally on my Mac (or Windows or Linux) and it does all the things a static site generator typically can do - but like... with buttons and rich text editors and whatnot.

So I kinda like it quite a bit so far! Obviously it can't do everything and it's not as flexible as some other tools which may or may not bite me someday, but for the moment I really just wanted something simple and easy to use - the kind of thing where I can spend maybe one afternoon configuring and then not think too much about it again.

Publii is all open source and free (there are paid plugins and themes out there for it which help support the developers). Everything is stored on your local computer so you can build previews for the site pretty quickly, you have a local copy you can work with offline (not that I'm ever offline), etc. All the data is stored in mostly regular files so if the app ever died there's a SQLite database with your stuff in it that could probably be pretty easily converted to some other format with a script. Stuff like that.

And it also has a bunch of deployment configuration options to make it easy to publish changes - I'm using SFTP, but it can send your site directly to GitHub Pages, GitLab, some Google stuff, Amazon S3 compatible hosts, a Git repo, etc. with the push of a button.

So here we are. I have a blog again. I don't know how often I'll use it or if anything I post here will be good or worth your time or anything like that... but hey - we'll see.