About 2 years ago, summer of 2015, I converted my Wordpress to a static website using Jekyll. Today, June 2017, I’m yet again refactoring my blog and homepage, but now using Hugo. In the end, the outcome is pretty much the same. The user experience with Hugo, however, is better.
Why going static?
I planned to write lots in this paragraph, but I’ll say it just quoting myself:
Less to hack; less to crack.
No comments? Where is Analytics? Search?
Lots of websites use clever tricks so they can track you even when you are not logged in or better, not even registered. I found that for whatever reason, Disqus for example would result in a cookie being set for Facebook (probably because user was using Facebook authentication).
Therefor, I removed the 3rd party embedded commenting tool Disqus although I liked it. If you want to comment, head over Twitter, or send me an email (see About).
Search, which was using Google, is also gone.
Framework-less
Except for Font Awesome, my homepage is not using any external framework or libraries such as jQuery or Bootstrap.
The responsiveness, or my attempt to master CSS, is pure my own. It will not work with older browsers, and I’m not like extensively testing on all platforms (I actually check it), but for my simple homepage, no need for anything huge. It’s again a few headaches less, by having a small headache doing pure Javascript.
Is static something for you?
Depends. If you can scale down and don’t need it all to fancy, sure. I could, and I can easily deploy to anywhere. I have my own root-server, but creating a container and deploying like that is something I could do as well. And maybe I will.