I’m planning on writing a LOT of articles.
So my ideal is to pretty much write them using the Markdown format. Meaning I can focus on the writing and practically forget about the formatting.
Then I’ll publish them on my website as quickly as possible.
But, I hit a snag…
(sigh!)
Systeme wasn’t playing ball — at least according to the rules of the game I decided on!
I use Systeme for my websites and it’s great for web page building.
But when I just want to do a quick paste in of an article it takes a bit more attention to make it look right.
I tried to get Systeme to do some backflips for me with some geeky CSS coding stuff.
But…
No bueno.
So I took a bit of a foray into the world of static website generators.
They don’t use fancy code or databases like most content management systems for websites do.
So they’re super-fast. And I don’t need to manually massage my original Markdown text into some other format to show online.
But, you guessed it… another snag…
The mindspace required to get up to speed was just too much.
This was a bit uncomfortable for me as I like shiny new things.
But we’re talking about spending a week learning a new website system rather than writing the actual articles that will help nudge my business forward.
I can’t justify the time cost.
So, as much as it pains me…
I’ve returned to the arms of my formerly jilted lover.
(No, it’s not a confession my wife needs to hear!)
I’m talking about… WordPress.
But I’m ONLY going to use it for the articles section of my site.
It’s a pure and simple pragmatic decision because:
- I can set it up with my eyes closed
- I know it can do what I need
- I’m only running a portion of my website on it — not the whole thing. So the rest of my site is protected from the WordPress curse (Maybe I’ll talk about that another day. Better yet… I’ll write an article!).
One day I’d still like to figure out something like 11ty (said: eleventy) and make things super lean and just plain cool with a static website. 😎
Even better, would be Systeme devs adding some features (they like doing that regularly) and allowing me to simply paste in a block of Markdown code for my article.
For now though…
Sometimes just doing the pragmatic thing is the best thing for our freelancing business.
It might mean taking the path of least resistance just to get something going.
You can always improve things later if needed… and if time and money allows. Or it may in fact be fine for the next decade.
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Chris Milham