Welcome to my first blog post!
This particular post may not contain much in the way of information, but it serves as a testbed to help me verify the website’s functionality.
Well, technically, this might not be my first blog post. I’ve experimented with a few different CMS platforms while trying to set up this site. Initially, I tried Blogger. Blogger is probably a good choice for someone who wants to put in the bare minimum effort to get a blog up and running. It offers basic site templates and a user-friendly interface for managing posts. However, I found the template selection quite limited. I didn’t really like any of the stylized templates they offered, and I couldn’t customize the look of the website to match what I had in mind. Blogger felt too simplistic—and ultimately, too restrictive—for what I was aiming for.
Next, I tried WordPress. It’s one of the world’s most popular CMS platforms for building, designing, and managing websites. It’s incredibly powerful and flexible, but that also makes it quite heavy, bloated, and complex. I was able to get a site up and running using WordPress, but I quickly got overwhelmed by everything I needed to manage. WordPress is great for someone who wants to build a feature-rich site, like an online store. For a simple blog, it’ll certainly do the job, but it’s a bit too heavyweight for my needs.
Finally, I found Grav CMS, which turned out to be the Goldilocks solution for me. It’s a lightweight, flat-file CMS that doesn’t require a database. All content—posts, configuration, and layout—is managed through the filesystem using files and folders. Want to add a post? You can either use the Grav admin UI or simply create a new folder and drop a Markdown file into it. The UI is really just a layer on top of that file system structure!
What I especially like is that most of the styling and functionality is handled using basic HTML, CSS, and PHP. That means the site is simple, fast, and fairly easy to customize. For my use case—a simple blog with a few informational pages—it’s perfect. Just like Goldilocks said: “Just right.”
One of my favorite mantras to live (and build) by is K.I.S.S.—Keep It Simple, Stupid.