Yesterday I posted about considering a move from Ghost over to a static site in an effort to save the $5/month I currently pay for hosting this particular blog.
I received some fantastic feedback from the Fosstodon community:
With that in mind I opted to attempt a trial of Hugo, hosted with Netlify. Enter Project: Shiny Potato! Following the Hugo quick start guide I soon got a local version running using a theme from the marketplace and some minor changes in place. As I moved around during the day I realised I'd need to be able to work on the site from any of 3 machines, covering macOS/Linux/Windows. This means I'd need to keep the Git repo up-to-date on all of them - no biggie.
Next was making sure I had my editors set up the same way for working the way I wanted, so I'd have to sync the settings there. Again, nothing too serious as I could use Syncthing here too.
Then came the phone. Sometimes I start a post while I'm on the throne. A place where all human-kind perfects thoughts. This one was a bit more of a pickle but @Basil did suggest using Forestry.io which could resolve this issue and also remove the requirement of making sure my editors were right.
So far we've thrown Git, Syncthing, Hugo, Netlify, Forestry, a multitude of cross service authorisations and Christ knows what other dependencies under the bonnet in to the mix for a "simple" static site. This seems like a hell of a lot of moving parts for something that was supposed to be simpler, faster, easier and less time intensive than maintaining the current hosting. Which, in all honesty, takes very little effort. I just wanted to save a few pennies.
In my personal opinion this is ridiculously over-engineered for something so simple. Granted, I could have just gone with GitHub Pages which would have cut down the complexity somewhat.
We've gone from something "complex"
To something "simple"
Call me stupid, but it takes far less effort (for me personally) to maintain the "complex" than it does this "simplicity". There is no way you can fool me in to thinking otherwise at this point in time.
Maybe I'm just a bit of a system admin fossil stuck in the dark ages. But $5 for my Nanode beats the stress of all those moving parts and points of failure any day.