The Modern Complexity of the Simple Blog

While researching a new platform for Macdrifter.com I learned just how complicated simplicity has become. I wanted to avoid Medium or Substack which meant I needed to accept my role in managing the publishing platform. I wasn’t prepared for how complex plain-text blogging has become.1

One popular trend is to implement a what I would consider a software development pipeline and not a blogging system. I love technology as much as the next nerd, but I do not understand this trend of increasing the dependencies and technical infrastructure for turning Markdown into HTML.

I’m sure that plenty of the examples I found were passion projects to learn about new technology or exercise a new skill. But, it was discouraging every time I read about GitLab CI or Docker container management. Now I fear that plain text blogging is really just a tool to explore new technologies, instead of a way to make portable blogging accessible.

I am still happy with the simplicity of Markdown but I’m no longer convinced that tools like Hugo or Pelican make it “easy.”

  1. I’m not going to link to examples because that would be rude and all of these folks seem genuinely excited about their projects. ↩︎