Starting Over, Again.

Posted on Sep 29, 2025

For whatever reason, I became bored and dissatisfied with this site. I neglected it for nearly a year. After another deep-dive into the rabbit hole of the indieweb, I am filled with the desire to have and maintain a personal website once again.

Which means that, as per my M.O., I’ve been spending way too much time reading through CMS and static-site generator documentation.. Trying to find the perfect, F/OSS, self-hostable solution to having a web presence. And of course, the perfect solution doesn’t exist. So, I’m allowing myself to just pick a poison and run with it. Make that two poisons. I’ll drink from both founts for an undetermined length of time which will hopefully give me insight into which system I prefer. [ That length of time turned out to be roughly 4 months. ]

Bludit.

The flat-file, no database backend, CMS. Almost exactly what I’m looking for. So close and yet lacking in ways I can’t get over. Bludit is the runner-up contender I will sadly be putting down and walking away from.

The good:

  • Admin backend is very concise and well laid out.
  • Content creation is quick, painless, and has rather sensible defaults. Expanding the meta-data for content is not a struggle and all options are easily accessible but not “in your face overwhelming.”
  • WYSIWYG HTML AND MARKDOWN EDITOR!!
  • Semi-easily themeable with some nice third-party themes available.
  • Decent, if outdated, plugin ecosystem.

The bad:

  • Doesn’t appear to be actively developed, for all appearances the project is in maintenance mode. Not necessarily a non-starter for my needs but…
  • Plugins are also mostly out of date. They’re PHP based and I have no way to tell how secure they are nowadays. Several plugins’ repos are non-existent as well, so no documentation.
  • Themes are PHP based and I don’t know the language, so yet another hurdle to customizing my site and making it my own.
  • Content is kept in JSON structure and doesn’t appear to be easily extracted from the CMS.
  • The community surrounding Bludit was in its prime back in early 2000s from what I can tell. The forum is fairly dead and any support I can search for is either in French or at least a decade old.

Hugo.

“Home sweet home.” I’ve been using this SAG off and on for nearly 5 years. It feels like using a machine gun to knit a sweater, and for the most part that’s acceptable. The need to operate most of its actions via the command-line is a blessing and a curse. There is ample space to develop and improve shell scripts for the repetitive hugo build, mv and chmod/chown to testing, and bundle a tar archive to FTP to my site’s server. I am still parsing the documentation for it. There are still concepts that allude my understanding.

It lacks a few features that are rather high on my wishlist.

  • Easy integration of privacy focused commenting systems.
  • A graphical CMS that can be web-based. [I remain convinced there is one out there. I just have yet to run across it.]
  • Easy integration of indieweb features: such as linkbacks, mentions, h-cards, etc.

So, after all the questing and researching and half-heartily learning a new piece of software, I’m right back where I started.. Go Hugo!!