This Site is Static Now
This blog started out on WordPress. I like WordPress! Or, I liked WordPress. Ever since 5.0 introduced the Gutenberg block-based editor, WordPress has given up on being a blogging platform in favour of competing with Wix and SquareSpace as a general web publishing tool with WYSIWYG editing. That’s nice for web design shops selling trendy landing pages to businesses, but it sucks for anyone who just wants a blog.
After tiring of wrestling with Gutenberg, I wrote scrumble. Scrumble is a static site generator. It takes a folder full of Markdown files representing blog posts and top-level pages and generates a blog in simple semantic HTML and CSS. I wrote my own SSG rather than use an existing one because they all seem to have the same problem as post-Gutenberg WordPress: they want to support the creation of any hypothetical website, with any layout. Off-the-shelf SSGs do this via complex templating systems rather than a fiddly web interface. I don’t want either! Scrumble is simple: Markdown goes in, website comes out. It generates exactly one kind of website: mine.
That’s the main reason for scrumble’s existence. Another is security. I’m not one of those people who considers WordPress fundamentally insecure. After all, it’s good enough for the White House. However, in my day job, I see compromised WordPress sites almost every day. This is almost always thanks to vulnerabilities in plugins, an issue I avoided on my own WordPress site by just not having any plugins. A static site is of course invulnerable to anything short of an attacker gaining access to the hosting backend.
A blog is really the simplest kind of website. Unless you’re a national news outlet, you don’t need a CMS. Plain text files and a script with a goofy name are more than enough.