I’ve created and managed this domain over the years using Blogger, WordPress, and GatsbyJS. Over the past 4–5 years, I lost momentum with publishing, and many of my earlier posts (especially about Jersey) remain scattered and unpublished. Now the itch to write and share has returned, and this time I hope to maintain the momentum at the very least, keeping my published notes alive.
Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
Why I Didn’t Choose Publii
I spent hours exploring options and came very close to picking Publii. It offers a quick way to launch a static website with decent themes.
Ultimately, though, a few things held me back:
- Its generated JS/CSS/HTML output isn’t as optimized as what you get from modern frameworks like Hugo or Astro.
- Although Publii is open-source and nearly 10 years old, its business model relies heavily on selling paid themes and plugins through a marketplace—this conflicts with my desire for a truly “no-strings-attached” static site generator.
- Theme selection is limited. Astro has excellent, modern but many indie vibe themes (e.g., Astro Paper), while most free Publii themes are bare minimum without a personality.
- No built-in automatic backup—if your computer dies, you lose everything unless you manually sync the project folder to iCloud, Dropbox, etc.
- The editor feels too much like the classic WordPress wp-admin dashboard.
- Co-authoring or collaboration is difficult.
The WordPress / Dynamic CMS Rabbit Hole
I also revisited WordPress and other dynamic CMS options, but they no longer felt right. Dynamic sites come with ongoing costs (hosting, plugins, security updates), and when you’re unsure how your content habit will evolve, there’s a real risk of abandoning the site and losing years of work—exactly what happened to my old WordPress blog.
Static Site Generation + Cloudflare Pages
That’s why I settled on a great Astro theme, a modern framework, GitHub for storage, and Cloudflare Pages for publishing.
For me, a smooth editing experience is essential. Right now I have two solid workflows that strike the perfect balance between simplicity and flexibility:
- Create and edit posts directly on GitHub.com or github.dev in a feature branch, then merge when ready. The built-in GitHub Markdown editor is surprisingly pleasant.
- Add a headless CMS later if I want an even easier interface (something I’ll explore down the road).
Even if the blog grows significantly, inviting collaborators is trivial just have them open pull requests. Everything stays version controlled and transparent.
Cloudflare Pages has a very generous free tier (with easy upgrades if needed), seamless GitHub integration, and instant preview URLs for every feature branch; perfect for reviewing changes before they go live.
Why Astro?
It started with falling in love with the Astro Paper theme. I still researched Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy, and others, but Astro clearly stood out because of its modern architecture, excellent developer experience, and rapidly growing community. Its popularity is skyrocketing, and it feels like the future of static site generation.
To be honest, I’m still early in my Astro journey and only know the basics so far, but I’m genuinely excited to dive deeper and see what it can do.
Conclusion
Choosing Astro + the Astro Paper theme, backed by GitHub and deployed automatically via Cloudflare Pages, feels like the perfect setup for my personal and technical website. It gives me the performance, flexibility, and simplicity I need to get back to writing and sharing ideas with the world without the overhead that killed my motivation in the past.