I have always had, as many people in my profession do, the urge to own a blogging website – coupled with no actual desire to write articles or any form of content.
I had no intention of writing my blog platform from scratch, because I knew that I’d never write a single article and would just be content with writing the code.
I didn’t want Wordpress, because one can always install new themes or new plugins – or, God forbid, even write custom plugins.
I didn’t want to pay for a blogging service, either.
To combat the paradox, I’ve set out to discover the optimum solution to my problem — a blogging platform that a) offers enough features b) is free c) does not allow for tinkering of any kind.
I landed on three things:
- Hugo, a static site generator
- PaperMod theme
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting
Hugo lets you write articles in Markdown, and there is not much else to do.
PaperMod gives you dark mode, multilingual support, responsive design, search, tags, and comments – should you ever need these. I haven’t touched any of it, don’t use half of it, and it just works out of the box.
Cloudflare lets you host the blog for free with zero setup — you point it to your GitHub repository and that’s it. Deployments consist of a git push. No server to manage, no SSL certificates, no CI pipelines. The only cost is the recurring domain renewal invoice.
No cost, no code, no server. This setup won’t be for everyone, but for my particular flavor of procrastination it was exactly right.