“Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology.”

Being a tech enthusiast and trying to keep myself updated with the trends, I am always learning new things. I prefer epressing those knowledge through my blogs.

But building a fancy website and maintaining both the front-end and back-end is beyond my patience. So that’s why I chose static site generators (SSG). And so far I am really satisfied with these.

I could have also used other platforms like Medium, Dev.to, etc. But I wanted to have my own website and I wanted to have full control over it.

Static Site Generators

You can think of SSGs like compilers for websites. You have some rich text content which are then converted to native HTML, CSS, JS codes according to the configuration. There are lots of advantages of using SSGs like:

1. Performance

Just check the lighthouse scores of this website. Its amazing. And this is just because of the static nature of the website. No server-side rendering, no database queries, no heavy javascript libraries, etc.

2. Easy to use

Once I am done with setup and deployment, to maintain the blog the amount of effort I have to put in is minimal.

Why does it matter? If you have read the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, you would know. To stick to a habit, you need to make it as easy as possible. For example,

  • You want to hit the gym regularly? Keep your gym clothes and shoes ready.
  • You want to read a book? Keep the book near your bed.

Similarly, I am trying to make writing blogs effortless for me and I have found SSg to be the best solution for that. Since I am not a writer, I usually don’t have any intrinsic motivation behind writing blogs. Using Hugo (the SSG that I am using) all I have to do is

hugo new posts/new_post.md

and then write the blog in markdown. That’s it. I don’t have to worry about the front-end, back-end, hosting, etc. I just have to write the blog.

3. Deployment

Deployment is hassle-free. I just have to push my code to the GitHub repository and the website is automatically deployed. I am using Vercel for deployment. I also have setup Github Action that automatically optimizes the images and runs the lighthouse test on the website.