I don’t write much here, but I occasionally write something and have done so for over 15 years in various forms. For many years I used a self-hosted Wordpress installation. At the time it was certainly fun to set up, comments were novel, and the interface was easy to use. But once comments basically became a never ending spam magnet, there was little point in having a VPS with PHP and MySQL just to serve some HTML. Since 2010 I’ve bounced around between various static blogging packages. Pelican, Jekyll, Octopress, Hugo… For a number of years I was using Hugo and pushing to an S3 bucket.
That worked well, but didn’t allow the ability to quickly fix a typo in the GitHub UI and have everything republished. I could fiddle around with GitHub actions (though they wouldn’t arrive until quite a bit later), but instead I decided to switch back to Jekyll and plain ol’ GitHub static page hosting. For my meager blogging needs it really doesn’t matter what software I use. But switching Jekyll lets me use GitHub to get both the instant-publish I’ve wanted, and to ditch the S3 bucket completely.
And that’s where I’m at. Hello once again, GitHub Pages.