brain trust: talk to me about hosted content?

[cellio]

I've written lots of stuff in a variety of places online -- (LJ to) Dreamwidth and Medium and SE and one-offs in handwritten HTML and (heaven help us) Twitter and probably some others. Some of it was transient, but some of it is stuff I'd like to keep available and together.

I have a domain and the hosting company offers what I gather are standard tools, of which Wordpress is the one that keeps coming up in searches about setting up simple web sites.

My domain isn't empty, but there's not a lot there. I have things with published URLs that need to not get disrupted, but I'd otherwise like to have a web site with some of the basics ("about" page, contact form) and, mainly, this collection of things I've written. I'm going to have to curate the things I've written anyway (I kind of gave up on the idea of bulk-importing 20 years' worth of Livejournal/Dreamwidth), so I don't mind if I have to post things one at a time. I'm going to be rereading them one at a time to decide their fates, after all.

I'd like it if whatever receives my words of (cough) wisdom spoke both HTML and Markdown. I will, of course, want to be able to tag those posts.

I need it to have a time-based archive (by month or whatever). I'd like tags to work as tags and not just visual labels -- that is, you should be able to click on a tag to see other things with that tag. I think all this is "blog 101" and tools generally do that stuff.

I need to be able to easily back up the content.

I don't know what other questions I should be asking myself.

I've read some of the "getting started with Wordpress" stuff on their site, but before I go much farther: will that meet my needs? (I can't tell about input formats and backups, in particular.) What else should I be looking at? What decisions should I be making before I install anything? What's the easiest path that would probably work for my (I think) modest needs?

Update: Thank you to the several people who pointed out that what I need (and the name for it) is static site generator. Further pointers still welcome.

Comments

[https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/hsFMttp]

Hi Monica - this is a perennial conundrum in my world. :o)

My favourite "small CMS" (which I've been using for many years) is in a bit of a development hiatus, so I won't suggest that just now. (It's poised to move forward, though, so will update this if it seems sensible, and you still haven't settled on your tool(s) of choice.)

However, Datenstrom Yellow (https://datenstrom.se/yellow/) is a nice half-way house between the "pure" static site generators and a CMS. It is built on just folders and (Markdown) files, with a few very simple management tools to facilitate content production and frontend display. It's been around for quite a few years (I've been using it off-and-on since 2014), it's actively developed (https://github.com/datenstrom/yellow), and very simple to deploy and use.

It tends to fly under the radar, so mention it, just in case some of the better known options are less than ideal for your situation.

Best wishes, as ever, from Edinburgh! David

[cellio]

Thanks David -- I appreciate the tips! I'll take a look at Datenstrom Yellow.

I hope you're doing well! I miss the old days of hanging out digitally together.