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I'm going to go out on a little bit of a limb here, but I bet you -- like most HN readers, including me -- are kind of, well, geeky/nerdy. (The fact that you're talking about generating content with org-mode and pandoc is kind of a big hint here, honestly.) Our requirements for hosting can be a little more demanding than the target audience WordPress aims at. But you know, I'm running WordPress for one of my sites now, and at least in my experience, the "constant security updates" are about as much of a nightmare as they are for iPhone applications at this point. It updates itself! Every so often I log into the admin panel and make sure the plugins I'm using are updated, too -- which is generally a few clicks. From a user standpoint, rather than a nerdy hacker standpoint, WP is frankly closer to a maintenance-free, turnkey CMS than I really thought possible. The majority of WP users never need to hack their theme and post code, and I'd say of the ones who do, the vast majority need to do it very, very rarely. I get that when you do look at it from a nerdy hacker standpoint, WP can be mildly to profoundly annoying. I am writing a new theme for my site to do a few specific things and I'm finding it kind of infuriating work. But as far as full-featured, self-hostable tools go, WP is just about impossible to beat. (And on many hosts the installation is pretty close to one-click; even if you have to do it manually, there are fewer steps with WP than with almost any other major web software package out there. Anyone wondering how PHP can possibly be still so popular when its fractal wrongness is so well documented just has to look at how easy installing WP is compared to installing roughly any other non-PHP web app ever written.) At any rate, the web isn't intrinsically any more difficult than it ever was: if you want to build a static web site, you still can, and you don't need any tools in 2016 that you wouldn't have had in 1996. The reason that hosted publishing solutions are so popular goes back to the difference between "nerd" and "non-nerd," I suspect: whatever else one can say about Medium, getting an article published through it and having it look good by modern design standards is really, really easy. I'd like to see more self-hosting blogging myself, but "just write your articles in your favorite plain text editor in Markdown, process them with Jekyll and push 'em up to your server of choice with rsync" is, for most of humanity, simply not an attractive alternative to "type into this WYSIWYG box and click Publish." |