Static site publishing is still (mostly) a pain

I love that static websites can just sit somewhere behind a simple web server and always just work. They’re fast and secure. However, I’m beginning to think that for certain sites, blogs for example, the joy of easy hosting loses out to the pain of publishing.

I know, “But it’s just a folder full of text files!” I get it, baty.net is currently a folder full of about 3000 markdown files. Still, in order to publish something I have to create a new markdown file in a particular folder, named in a particular way, in a particular format. I have scripts that help, but I tire of tinkering with scripts instead of just writing stuff and clicking “Post”.

There are some decent solutions to the problem of publishing static sites. I think Blot.im does a great job of taking the pain out of publishing text files. 1999.io is basically a nice front end to a rendered static blog. Siteleaf looks nice. And so on.

But you know what works pretty well for managing and publishing an active blog? WordPress. We are supposed to hate WordPress (oh no, there’s a database!), but if I were going to start a new site/blog and planned to publish frequently, especially if posting a lot of images, without too much fuss, I’d probably go with WordPress. In fact I probably will.