Moving Away from Writefreely
2024-12-11
Writefreely is an extremely light weight CMS for bloggers, which enables you to write everything on the blog without the need of a text editor.
I started using writefreely around 2022, with my first post made at 2022-03-23T10:34:38.73411671Z. Since then, I have been consistently using it for more than 2 years.
However, now I'm moving away from the platform, This blog documents my process of changing my CMS and rationale behind it.
Moving away
Writefreely is a dead simple platform, and problem also lies in its simplicity: it's hard for me to customize anything.
Because of this, my old website looked half-ass, and there's way to add support for other features. Also the markdown writer doesn't have essential editor features like linting and syntax highlighting.
Also, it doesn't have a good way to manage, update or even export its instance. You have to manually write systemd files, place your binaries to update or install, and you have to write a parser yourself in order to export your markdown files, which I did
What's more, their saas strategy kinda sucks, because they have proprietary platforms like snap.as that allows you to upload photos, they are integrated with the paid write.as instances, but not writefreely instances. The devs doesn't give much of reasons apart from stability and maintainence, well we all know what that means.
Sooo after spotting so many cool blogs, I decided to change platform and make my own stylish (prolly) blog.
Zola
Zola is a ssg with a high customizability. I thought I need to write rust, but turns out you only need to write html and css for layouts, and write markdown for content.
It has a clean structure for customizing your sites, basically every goodies that comes with a modern ssg, but without any bloat.
Setup
My setup is hand written html and css (prolly adding frameworks in the future). On the dev side I have set up pre-commit to check for errors and format my code, met with some difficulties because the author kinda sucks, and github actions for automatically updating the blog website on neocities
Outro
I don't know how to close this article, so I'm posting comparision of both websites:
old:
new: TODO