> whatever setup minimizes the daylight between wanting to write, and writing.
No matter your setup, writing in markdown is the fastest way to get your ideas/thoughts to a presentable format. That should work in all good CMS/blog/static/dynamic software.
The markdown can have associated markdown settings that are either in a comment at the top or a sidecar file that can be adjusted to any platform.
Whenever I write I do it in markdown, get the thoughts out, clean it up, add presentation. Then I know there is no lock-in or ownership of the content to any system.
If you do change systems there may be some initial settings/markup/declarative hooks you need for things like embeds/code highlighting etc, but after that you are rolling.
Standards whether specified or market standards, always help you evade lock-in and can make your content a free agent when needed.
Software today is a mine field of lock-in created by large entities that want you to develop in an abstracted layer above the simple standards, even at the programming level we have lost focus of shared standards that give you platform freedom.
After various iterations of my personal webpage, and losing content in every migration, I've just ended up just going with raw HTML in the style of motherfuckingwebsite.com.
It helps that my hobby is retrocomputing, so my plain HTML pages can actually be loaded on a 25 year old version of Netscape. Doing my writing on an old PowerBook running System 7.5 also helps cut out distractions, and being a bit of a novelty makes the writing fun instead of a chore.
I have the same problems as both OP and the blogger: I want absolutely nothing to do with the hosting of the blog itself. I just want it to be a writing platform, a very very simple one, and nothing more.
This allows me to do plenty of things. There are no servers to manage, and I write my posts with vim and use Markdown. I have a simple theme. Deployment and testing happens automatically through Amplify.
If I really, really, absolutely must, I can dig deeper into Hugo and do whatever I want. But if I just want to stick to the basics, I write files in the content folder and edit the settings file the first time. That's it!
And because it's in AWS, I can use cert manager and Route53, things I already know from work, to put my domain on it.
This was a lot easier for me than anything else. I previously used Ghost hosted on a Digital Ocean instance, but I quickly grew tired of having to update Ghost, dealing with node, etc. Plus having to worry about securing the site and the instance. Patching the instance. Backups.
How about Hugo’s stability when upgrading? I haven’t tried it myself, but have read many a comment (including on HN) on how even minor version upgrades end up breaking things.
I honestly haven't updated! Or at least, not purposely. The package in Ubuntu's repo is at v0.68.3 which was released at the end of March. So apparently I updated at least once. Latest version is 0.74.3.
A lot of the updates I am missing seem to be simple bug fixes.
This is what happened to me when I thought it would be a good idea to build my own blog software.
These days I'm a believer in using whatever setup minimizes the daylight between wanting to write, and writing.