I started this blog on a static site generator hugo. I still love hugo, markdown and git-based workflow. But when I shifted this blog back to WordPress, many asked me why I did that.
Well, I already answered this question for some friends and colleagues. Here I am giving my comparison and analysis of two platforms after using them!
WordPress
- When I started, I had no idea, I will write so often on personal blog. In fact, I felt I will have nothing much to share when it comes to non-technology stuff.
- Now as I write more, most of my blog posts has images. WordPress has much easier workflow to add images in post. Uploading, resizing and aligning are all easy.
- WordPress has mobile apps. I use Android mobile apps with Google Voice Input to record my draft posts. That way, I can save myself from typing a lot. Of course, I had to correct outcome at many places, but voice-to-text makes drafting quite easy. Hence this blog has started to pile up with draft blog posts!
- Personal blog do not need collaborative editing. So what I hate most about WordPress is not applicable to this site.
Static Site Generators
I still love them! We are in process of moving many parts of rtcamp.com moved to different static site generators. They have their own strengths:
- Collaborative editing using git and web-interface powered by something like github/gitlab. This is much-needed to keep documentation section updated. Note that editing is more frequent than adding new pages for documentation site. It’s also very important to track changes as a wrong edit can create trouble many users.
- Technical documentation have good amount of inline codes. So using backticks (
`) feel more comfortable than opening and closing HTML tags like<pre>and<code>. This is where markdown scores big! - Documentation do not have many images. So adding images is not something quite frequent. For image-hosting, we prefer Github.
- Offline editing. You can not only write content offline but manage entire site offline. This is unbeatable in terms of speed as well as efficiency.
Summary
So as you see, both WordPress as static site generators has own use cases. I will probably shift to hugo or some other static-sit generators again in future.
I feel static site generators need to put some efforts to optimize writing workflow. Hugo has something for this already on its roadmap.
I think main concern is image and attachment uploading. Git is not suitable for binary files. So I wish a static site generator to add something like git-annex or git-media to writing workflow. Some more ideas can be found in this stackoverflow thread.
Links: WordPress | Hugo | List of Static Site Generators
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