The only thing that doesn't change is CHANGEThe blogging platforms are also subjected to changes. After this blog is started the major change in blogging space is the static site generators which allow us to write in markdown and compile to static sites.
Most of the techies moved or moving to markdown based static site generators. Even companies such as Google and Microsoft using static site generators for documentation sites.
https://www.stevencombs.com/web/2014/06/13/why-i-moved-from-blogger-to-jekyll.html
https://www.stevencombs.com/web/2014/06/13/why-i-moved-from-blogger-to-jekyll.html
What is a static site generator
As of writing this post, the popular site generators are Jekyll, Hugo, etc...Every year a new site generator will be born claiming it is the best one and most of the people advocate the same.
A static site generator as per Python Wiki is
Static site generator is a software that takes some text + templates as input and produces html files on the output.
It doesn't mean the JavaScript cannot be used. Just avoid server-side dynamic rendering on each request. The server in this case just returns the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Really good if we want to host the blog in GitHub pages than running our own server. There are some companies also there who provide freemium services
A list can be found here which has many static site generators to choose one from.
What is missing in Blogger
But this blog is still with Blogger. Before we see why it is not moving to site generators, lets us see what is missing in Blogger.
Table of contents
Most of the static site generators automatically build the table of contents from the headings. Blogger doesn't have this feature out of the box. But we can write extensions to customize it.
Easy theme customization
Blogger uses a different language to customize. But on the other side, for beginners, it is easy to change colors and all using a visual interface.
Why I am not moving to the static site generators
This can be read as what Blogger offers without any efforts
Stats
Statistics about visitors are important in the social media world such as the blog. Blogger has this feature inbuilt. When we use a static site generator we need to embed some scripts which collect the user data and save somewhere.
Monetization
Blogger has the capability to insert ads even inside the blog posts. When we use static site generators, we may add explicit ad blocks in the template. Adding in between would be difficult though not impossible.
Comments
Without comments blog is useless. We can integrate the static site with different comment service providers. The popular one is Disqus but there are others as well.
Scheduled posts
Normally the site builds on commits. Even if we attach a scheduled date into the post to let the generator know that it is a future post, there should be some mechanism to trigger the build on the scheduled time. People write small serverless triggers to do rebuild. It can be done completely free using AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Zapier, etc... But our time to set up, testing is required.
Multi authors
I have only one blog where I did co-authoring. Now pretty much all the blogs I am posting myself. Hugo and all have support for multi authors by creating profiles of all authors. It is really easy in Blogger and all where there is already a profile available.
Performance
One big reason people going behind static site generators is the blog page load performance. I never faced any issue with Blogger on the initial loading time. Also, no complaints from my audience though it is very few in number :)
Experience from the static site generator users
Scalability concerns
Conclusion
The decision now is to continue Blogger. But will be evaluating the static site generators and migrate when the time comes.
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