I’ve been getting a bit antsy about continuing to pay Squarespace to host Headtilt, mostly due to the infrequent updates that I seem to be doing over the last couple of years, and partly because I think I feel the need to tinker with stuff.
For ages I’ve liked the idea of static site generators, and occasionally I’ll go and play with one for a while before falling out of love with the idea of writing up posts in Markdown, having to remember its syntax for links, images, etc, and then go running back to the arms of a regular CMS.
Recently I started checking out Publii. It generates static pages, but has a nice CMS style GUI editor that you can create posts in and manage the site before pushing it out to a hosting platform (in this instance Github Pages).
The downside is of course, migrating content out of Squarespace. Although they offer exporting to WordPress style XML, actually importing that content anywhere has been a less than ideal experience. Publii includes a tool to do this automatically, but nicely sorting those imported posts into tag categories is less fun, since you have to manually edit each post (lucky I’m a lazy writer!) and add relevant tags, and the automatic image downloading failed due some screwy file naming in the Squarespace export. This would be ok if images were stored in a central repository, but unfortunately, Publii stores posts in individual folders in the root directory, with images stored within those folders, meaning lots of manual fiddling with file locations, editing HTML in individual posts, etc.