When I first thought about moving from Blogger to Pelican, it was because I'd had more than enough of Blogger's drawbacks. What hadn't crossed my mind, because I had no experience of using them, were the problems that static site generators could have. At the time, my hunch was that it wasn't possible for them to be worse than Blogger.
As it turns out, that was the case. But, they are not entirely perfect and, going through this migration, I better understood what the good and the bad of static site generators are. If you're thinking of making a similar migration, these points might give you an idea of what you might deal with in shifting.
While I'm familiar with Pelican and Blogger, most of the points apply generally so could still be informative for you if you're considering a move from, say, Wordpress to Jekyll.
Converting and writing content (Markdown)
Bad
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Depending on what you used to create a blog previously, and how much content you had on your old blog, it may be time consuming to move content. Even armed with a fork of Pelican where someone helpful had added Blogger conversion, the output wasn't perfect and still had plenty of residual cruft that had to be fixed up by hand.1
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Markdown's quick to write with, but only gives you a small subset of HTML and so doesn't handle every eventuality. There are dialects of Markdown which expand this with more layout options that may be available in your blog software of choice.
With Pelican at least, it's possible to use Pandoc via a plugin. Pandoc is one of the more versatile Markdown converters, but does introduces another dependency. Pelican also offers reStructuredText support which has support for more formatting options than vanilla Markdown, but just isn't as nimble to write.
Instead, I opted to occasionally allow fall back to raw HTML in posts, mainly for handling images. This isn't ideal, but is a decent compromise that's at least compatible with different Markdown implementations.
Good
- All my content is in fairly plain Markdown which I love writing in. It also means that I'm far less locked into Pelican than I was ever tied into Blogger. Should I wish to switch to another static site generator, only the metadata and Python-Markdown specific tweaks may need adjusting.
Adding content to the site and hosting
Bad
- My git repositories are structured in a way that I like: blog HTML, the theme I use, my Pelican configuration, my Markdown posts, and the post images are all separate. However, for making small adjustments to posts, this is a nuisance: you need to edit the post and remember to push that, then generate the HTML, then move that into the HTML repository and finally push that to GitHub. I usually do this via branches too, which is more work too (though this is my choice). Improving this workflow is on my to-do list.
Good
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My blog's not trapped within Google's servers. Certainly, I'm wary of how much Google's hands are present in much of what I do on the web, whether through hardware devices I use, their search tools or through websites that use features like Google Analytics and Fonts (including mine). At least the blog's now hosted elsewhere and Analytics and Fonts that the site's using could, in the worst case, be removed entirely, or replaced with alternatives.
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In fact, the blog's not really dependent on the whims of any service owner at all. If GitHub stop hosting, I can take the HTML and host it elsewhere. With Blogger, you're at Google's mercy: if they ever decided to drop Blogger, then you'd be forced to switch to a new blog platform.
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All the content is tracked within a git repository. This means it's version controlled, and there's no easy way to obliterate posts. With Blogger, at least once, I foolishly attempted to edit multiple posts in separate browser tabs and subsequently lost the content of one of them. Luckily, I had a window open with the web version of the post to recover it. Having only a single canonical copy of posts stored in Google's servers was clearly not a good thing. (Wordpress is better in that it's possible to store multiple revisions of posts.)
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You have much more control of the post URLs; Blogger posts always have the year and date in them.
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Blog hosting using my own domain name on GitHub is free of charge. This is also free on Blogger. If you use wordpress.com, you'll need to pay; if you're using your own Wordpress installation, using your own domain is free, but it's likely you'll need to pay for hosting.
Appearance and viewer experience
Bad
- With Pelican (probably much less so for Jekyll), there's not a huge range of themes. If you're fussy like me, you may need to spend some time tweaking, or creating your own.
Good
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My site now functions without the viewer needing JavaScript. With Blogger, you used to only see half the page content. If JavaScript is disabled now, the only issue is that the mobile menu doesn't open, which is far less of a problem.
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There's no awful separate mobile version of the site. On Blogger, the template I used had an unfriendly feature where swiping would navigate away from the page to the previous or next article. This could be triggered quite unintentionally by trying to pinch to zoom.
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Often my posts are on programming. Having code snippets that look nice without me having to do anything is a great bonus. In Blogger, you'd need a JavaScript plugin for syntax highlighting.
Running the generator
Bad
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Static site generators are not for the impatient. For Pelican, being comfortable with Python is a big help, though not essential. Pelican — and I imagine this applies to Jekyll too — isn't difficult to get a basic blog up and running, but to get the result you want may take you considerable work.
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If you have a very large number of posts, the time it takes to build your site may become an issue. With 61 posts and 1 page, my site takes 2 to 3 seconds on my Core i5 PC. If the site starts taking minutes to build, that may become a chore. This would be particularly frustrating if editing posts and wanting to quickly preview how the changes look since, with Pelican, the entire site is rebuilt when running the development server.
Good
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Pelican is nice to use, and I had very few problems in doing so. Most of my effort was spent on converting content and amending the theme to my liking. Though the community's relatively small, it does seem like there are more blog posts and activity compared with when I first looked into it last year.
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Pelican, and many other static site generators, are open source software. This means they are free to use, and free to modify (and share those modifications). The implication is that, as long as there are developers interested in it, it's likely that it will continue to be supported and developed. Even in the unlikely event that everyone else abandons it and you're the only user, you can still continue modifying it. (This also applies to Wordpress' source too incidentally.)
Living with a static site
When worrying about the limitations that static sites may have, think about the actual minimum you need on a web site to share and present written ideas and thoughts you have. It's really not very much; do you really need everything that Wordpress offers?
Overall, I'm pleased with the result. When I'd started thinking about moving, I'd got fed up of using clunky old Blogger, which feels distinctly unloved by Google.
Being able to write directly in the format (Markdown) that the blog actually uses is a real convenience. (Note that Wordpress offers this option too.) Along with that, the blog looking fresher than it did is a bonus. These features, more than perhaps anything else, actually makes me want to add new content to my blog, which is more than I could say that Blogger ever did for my inspiration.