I’ve left WordPress. Finally.

WordPress isn’t bad. In fact for most people I think WordPress or Medium are probably the right choice – but for about 18 months I’ve wanted to move to a solution where I hosted my content on GitHub and then published it from there.

Why ? (the original reasons from 18 months ago)

• I love writing in MarkDown. I want to write more blogs and in order to write more – I need to enjoy doing it.
• I wanted the content without HTML formatting. This allows me to do more with it.
• I wanted to be able to collaborate with my blog content. I want other people to be able to make corrections / update / contribute to my content. If you want to make a change or an addition – feel free to make a pull request.
• I wanted to own all my content in a portable format. I use a little Jekyll syntax, but most of the content on the site is written in pure, portable markdown

Why? (the driving reasons that made me finally do it)

• I like having some ‘real’ projects to maintain
• I wanted to be able to easily edit content offline
• I wanted a project to use for Azure demos around topics like DevOps, containers and Azure FrontDoor

Why not ? (Reasons this approach is silly for most people)

• You are maintaing code and investing time in something that someone else will do for (Almost) free

Other Solutions that I considered

Hosted Services

Medium https://medium.com/

If you just want to elegantly write content Medium is clean and awesome. This is a great option.

Hosted WordPress https://wordpress.com

WordPress.com is where I hosted my blog for the last 7 years. I set it up, and it just ran. I paid about $5/month to remove the adds and have a custom domain. It supports a huge ecosystem of plugins and functionality. For most developers this is probably my recommended solution. Official hosted wordpress – https://wordpress.com Alternative hosted WordPress (My friend Jason has used this for years and loves it) https://www.bluehost.com/

Hosted Ghost https://ghost.org

Ghost is where all the cool kids were at. If hosted Ghost were not 6x more expensive that WordPress, everyone would use this. This article from Troy Hunt is a great summary of why it’s the best choice if you are happy to pay the money. https://www.troyhunt.com/its-a-new-blog/

Self Hosted Services

Self Hosted WordPress

Don’t do it.
If you are going to do it yourself – Host Ghost

Self Hosted Ghost https://blog.ghost.org/2-0/

Watch this space for more on running Ghost images on Azure.

Resources and Thanks

I got the idea for this method from the old version of the Azure Docs which used Jekyll. I created this project from scratch because the old docs used very outdated versions of dependencies like Jekyll and Bootstrap but I have taken the page templates and a few scripts from their repo… so big thanks to the team who put it together !!!