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

[dsrtao]

The problem with WordPress is that it is an active system that consults a database and does some calculation to put together any given page. The result is a flexible system with lots of useful modules... with a terrible track record for security and performance. If you go with WordPress, you need it as an actively managed service with a lot of support behind it.

The other end of the spectrum is a "static site generator", in which your content (HTML, Markdown, RST, anything that pandoc can interpret) is rendered into HTML and CSS when you pull the trigger. That produces a site which will have no exploitable security issues (because it's not interactive) and is blazingly fast on very little hardware (because all the computation was already done).

Everything you have asked for is doable in WordPress or any SSG. Take a look at https://blog.randomstring.org for my SSG-created site -- the SSG I use is called Pelican -- which features a time based archive, tags, about page, and so forth. There are services which run SSGs for you, at costs ranging from small to medium, and there are ways of hosting such a thing on GitHub or the like at nearly no cost at all. That last option does put you at the risk that GitHub (or whoever) will decide to drop a free service at some point.

[cellio]

Ah! Yes, thank you. I don't need dynamic content and the vulnerabilities that come with it. I want to post static content, which can have links back to DW or Medium for comments. I was not thinking about "static" vs. "dynamic" when doing searches.

Ironic story: in 1995 I was working for a team that was doing micropayments via the web. Well, that was the idea, anyway. So we had a web site with a lot of static content (about us) and infrastructure for merchants and some other stuff. When I got there, all that static content was being maintained in individual HTML pages, including all the boilerplate stuff like page headers and nav buttons and stuff. When you wanted a new page you copied an existing one and edited.

Ok, it was 1995; there wasn't much in the way of tools and CSS hadn't been invented yet. This worked ok...until someone wanted to redesign some of that boilerplate, and every page was going to have to be edited.

I said "yo, there is an easier way", and built a minimal generation system that would do what we needed. It took inputs for page header, page footer, and the actual content. When we wanted to change the boilerplate we edited or added one of these templates. (Different sections of the site had different requirements, so there were several templates.) What I wrote was really simple-minded -- nothing dynamic, just concatenation and wrapping the standard HTML stuff around the output. It was a static page generator. :-) And I had completely forgotten about it until now.