[xrd]

I love this writeup.

The solution the author comes to is great, AND, I think it says that as a blogger you should probably always own or create your own tools.

I went down this same path, and Svekyll is my result (combination of Jekyll conventions with Svelte).

(https://svekyll.com or https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/)

Svekyll offers a different perspective to get the same benefits as documented in this great post. I love that we generally reached the same conclusions as to what is important.

  * WYSIWYG editor: Svekyll just builds from Markdown files (https://svekyll.com/Markdown)
  * Customizable themes: Svekyll lets you configure DaisyUI themes in your _config.yml (e.g.: theme: dracula, https://svekyll.com/Theme)
  * SEO out of the box: Svekyll has this too (https://svekyll.com/SEO).
  * Runs forever: Svekyll compiles each post to a single independent HTML page (zero JS or CSS links, it is all inlined, https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli#technical-notes-on-svekyll-cli)
  * RSS Feed Support: add rss: true to the _config.yml and get RSS. And, you can even add RSS feeds for each tag. (https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests/11, and see an example here: https://webiphany.com/2023-10-16-building-webapps-for-the-amazon-kindle-paperwhite-browser)
  * Improved post creation: while not a feature of Svekyll itself, ExtraStatic (my hosting service) let's you create posts as Markdown by sending an email. This is an example where building on a simple foundation like Markdown opens a ton of possibilities.
  * Analytics: Add matomo analytics to Svekyll in your _config.yml (https://svekyll.com/Analytics).
  * Featured posts: stumped by this, but definitely a problem!

[teh_klev]

> as a blogger you should probably always own or create your own tools.

That's all fine and dandy if you're a developer (or have some developer skills). But my mate who wants to blog about wood working isn't a developer and has no interest in building his own blogging tools.

I'm a developer and even I don't want to build and maintain my own blogging tools, I just want to write about the stuff I find interesting (most of which isn't necessarily development related).

[xrd]

Agreed. I tried to convey that by saying "own or create" because I feel like Wordpress always "owned" me (not the other way around) and I couldn't stand being forced to use it in a certain way.