The tech stack of this blog and the future of CMS
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The "tech" stack
I decided to improve my writing skills by publishing blog articles. I needed a place on the internet to do this, and I also wanted to "play around." What better opportunity is there to make mistakes in a safe environment than on your own homepage?
I enjoy the markdown format a lot, so I decided to write all my content in it.
Still, serving raw markdown files was a bit too "raw." HTML with a little CSS was probably more user-friendly. So I instructed Cursor to write a static HTML generator in C#. I also tweaked the CSS a little "by hand" just to remind myself that I still know CSS.
I love Git—it's the best way to keep track of content changes, not only code.
I needed an SSL certificate and a web server to serve my HTML. Caddy can do both.
I needed some kind of "machine" to run Caddy on, so I grabbed a mini VM at Hetzner. I wanted to stay independent of any cloud provider, but I also wanted to be able to recreate my setup on another machine easily. So I let my LLM write some simple provisioning shell scripts.
That's it. Probably took about 2 hours, with 45 minutes spent optimizing the favicons.
Future of CMS
I also thought about using Hugo, Ghost, or something similar. But why bother with their opinionated way of doing things? In the past, I used Ghost for a private project, but that was a long time ago—before LLMs. Back then, Ghost saved me quite a bit of setup time. Now, an LLM can create the exact environment I like with the tooling I feel comfortable with. I don't think Hugo, Ghost, et al. will have a bright future—at least for personal projects.