willangley.org, and some short-lived predecessor blogs, ran without a server for about a decade total: intermittently between 2004 and 2009, and then steadily from 2014 through the middle of 2019. Most of this time was spent running as a static site with Jekyll on GitHub Pages.
I really enjoyed writing in Markdown. Sublime Text is a great Markdown editor; Marked 2 is a great Markdown previewer. You can get a lot of writing done quickly. And the environment really does make it easier to concentrate by hiding formatting controls away.
But I hit a wall almost as soon as I wanted to share something that wasn’t writing.
Hitting a wall
I’d picked up an old Pentax K1000 and started taking photos on film in 2015, and by 2018 I had several albums that my friends had enjoyed seeing in person and I wanted to share with the world.
In September 2018 I spent three days putting an image gallery on my site to share the photos for one roll of film, and was incredibly frustrated at the end.
I had no idea how to extend Jekyll, since I had never learned Ruby. I thought “well, let’s switch to something I can extend,” and knew Go, so I spent two days migrating my site to Hugo on essentially a reflex.
This was a bad decision, and although I didn’t realize it, it was documented as such at the time. I spent the third day in a tarpit of slow thumbnail rebuilds as I kludged together a {{< gallery >}} shortcode to scale my scanned photos down to thumbnails and show them as a film strip.
I checked in the images, realized I was going to run out of room in the GitHub repo that held my site if I shot a roll of film every weekend for nine months, and then put off dealing with it until spring 2019.
Searching for something better
I spent a long time looking in Spring 2019, and ran down a lot of dead ends: letting myself have ideas about things I wanted, not writing them down, trying an approach that might fulfill one idea, and then realizing I’d hedged myself out of another thing I wanted.
I talked to some very smart engineers at Google as I was looking, and it didn’t help; we’d all read the same things that had steered us wrong.
Solving my problem
I got out of this by talking to different people, who I knew from outside of work, and who made websites for a living. They used WordPress.
It was hard to get myself to try this, because it’s got tons of what Silicon Valley culture doesn’t like in a program. It’s 20 years old, complicated, made of PHP, and you need to run a server to use it. And I’d personally spent some years saying “friends don’t let friends run WordPress,” after helping recover a hacked WordPress site and move it to Squarespace.
I was wrong to repeat that. Even if I couldn’t teach someone how to run their small business from WordPress in 2014, I might be able to learn enough to run my personal website in 2019. And not trying it was feeling increasingly like a mistake of values – like not making a painting because someone might rip the canvas.
I found a guide on Hosting WordPress Yourself that looked reasonable, and it worked.
When I got stuck theming the website, I asked my friend what they did for that. I was a little surprised by their answer, so I asked at the local WordPress meetup‘s help desk, and they said the same thing: use the Genesis Framework. So I did.
That worked too. Even though I hadn’t written PHP for 10 years, I was able to finish theming my site within a day.
Retrospective
I caught up on all of the photo albums I was sitting on and then some, and my site’s been running smoothly ever since: downtime monitoring says my site’s gone down for an hour and a half of downtime in a year and a half of running, so I’m north of 99.9% uptime.
There’ve been a few kinks, mostly in the spaces I know I didn’t quite follow the guides that I was working from; now that my server is prompting me to upgrade it I need to figure out what I did, write it down, and get ready to build it again.
But even with that, not-running a server cost me more than running a server ever has.