When I first started blogging, I used WordPress and Google's Blogger. In college, I was introduced to Jekyll and static-generated sites through Robotix, the first framework I used to build bauva.com. Then I moved it to Zola once my system dependencies started messing up Ruby stuff. It's highly efficient for serving, you know. Generate all the HTML pages, serve them directly without running any servers, and host them directly off GitHub with a git-commit and git-push. Plus, it sounded cooler than WordPress.
As I started writing more and had a few more "bells and whistles", the post-writing work started taking about half an hour. The linking of pages, related posts, writing a description, making a newsletter, fixing grammar, etc. And the worst part was that once I wrote an article, I had this huge inertia to go back and edit it. A consequence of that was that I started writing less. Also, there were some more things I began to imagine that would make this website a lot better, which needed me to allow writing actual code to automate some stuff and add some cool features.
I have worked with Wagtail primarily because many apps I build are Django-based. I like the composability of Wagtail, and it provides me with the ability to code in a language I am familiar with. It turns out that a lot of Content Management Systems (CMS) are either PHP- or JavaScript-based, and I'm more comfortable with Python. A proper content management system has its perks, like the ability to do stuff with button clicks and drag and drop. Also, these days I don't mind paying $5/mo.
I might never have made this change if it weren't for vibe-coding through cursor. I use Hetzner to host it, Tailscale to SSH and Cloudflare as a frontend proxy. I expose zero ports directly to the internet, and all traffic must go through Cloudflare. My database is PostgreSQL, and for this project, I avoid Tailwind because a professional designer made it, so I don't need to change much in styling. I have to add Celery+Redis as a queue. I already have PostgreSQL backup scripts for my other apps, which have been tested for restores, and I copied them over.
There's one cool feature I plan on adding once I cross 100 posts that will allow you to ask questions to the website as if you are asking those questions directly to me. It will be a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) based chat feature. I will try to write down more stuff from my brain to this website so that the value of this feature keeps increasing. This would be painful to do with a static-generated site (although not impossible), and you would still need some backend.