For many years, I used WordPress for my website/blog. I was never really happy writing in the WordPress editor. Often, the editor would screw up my code snippets, and it felt like using MS Word, which I always have a bad writing experience with. WYSIWYG editors are not my preferred way of writing and never will be. I want to blog more, but I don’t want to use the WordPress editor anymore.
I’m a Programmer Link to heading
I’m a programmer and prefer using technologies like Markdown, reStructuredText (rst), etc., to write my content. With those technologies, I can focus on the content and not fight against the editor. I also want to use my daily coding editor, VS Code, because I like it and feel really productive with it. I know about things like Hugo, the static site generator, but I don’t want to generate the static content and then copy it via FTP to my server. I could use GitHub Pages for that, but I don’t like putting my raw code (for the blog) into the public domain. I’m also not the biggest fan of GitHub’s approach to use a special branch for release control. Then I tried out GitLab Pages.
GitLab Pages Link to heading
GitLab Pages is the easiest way I can think of to publish static site content. With its great GitLab-CI system, you can do nearly anything you like. It also uses a special CI job name to publish content, allowing me to use any branching strategy I prefer. I’m also a big GitLab fan in general because I use it heavily at work, so it feels like home.
Hugo, GitLab Pages and VS Code Link to heading
Starting with this post, I will use VS Code to write Markdown, GitLab Pages and Hugo to get my HTML and publish it to my website. All controlled via Git. I’ve ported my old blog posts to Markdown, and now I have my new website/blog.