The quiet evolution of this site

I wanted to share, and document, a little bit about how I now manage this site, and how it's changed over the years.

Since I started writing here, the site has been flat file based. That means it's built from a series of files rather than a database-driven CMS. This was something I chose purposefully from the get-go as I love the simplicity and portability of working as close to the html and css as possible.

The first big change was back in 2020 when I moved the site from static html pages to Jekyll. This was a revelation at the time. Suddenly I was able to separate content, design and structure just that little bit more. What's more, I was able to do this with the actual site looking and feeling no different whatsoever. It did introduce a build step - each change I made, including adding posts, required me to build the site and push it live.

Then, in 2021 I switched to Eleventy. I'd hit bumps with getting the build process for Jekyll back up and running on a new Mac and suddenly I was spending more time fiddling with the setup than actually writing. That said, I was still hitting friction that stopped me posting as much as I'd like to which meant fewer posts and long pauses.

Fast forwarding to last year, 2025, I got around to tightening things up a little. I updated a lot of the dependencies and underpinnings that I'd let slide, and, while that didn't fundamentally change things, it did make the site feel just that fraction less cumbersome to work with.

Earlier this month I wrote about iterating. Making those little incremental changes that add up to something much bigger. Behind the scenes some of those changes paid huge dividends. The biggest two changes are that now this site runs on Cloudflare Pages and I'm using PagesCMS to publish to it. The Cloudflare Pages change means I push to my GitHub repo and Cloudflare Pages does the rest. It builds the site and deploys it. Plus, I get the performance benefits of Cloudflare to boot! PagesCMS means I see the benefits of a traditional CMS without the overhead. I write (or paste) these posts into an editor, add the additional data and that's it. No editing files. However, the files are still there meaning no lock-in should I decide to use some other setup (and, let's face it, the posts I've linked to above suggest that over the next five years I'll switch multiple times).

I like the way the flow for posting here has changed and evolved over the years:

  1. write html files → sftp to server
  2. write markdown files → build → sftp to server
  3. write markdown files → push to repo
  4. write!

I also enjoy the fact that, at its core, this site is still just human-readable html files (albeit with the advantages of a DRY approach).

All in all, this is an ode to the joys of tinkering and iterating. Long may both continue.

© Alex Magill