> Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste.
Aside from taste being subjective, most of the tools mentioned are customizable. That is, you can tweak the markup and CSS to your own taste.
The post starts being concerned about aesthetics but then finishes with:
"Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough."
Finally, time is money. Spending an added hour (or two) with a build process (or whatever) isn't savings at all. If Goal #1 is to publish then anything that gets in the way should be avoided.
There are some solid points made, but the argument is inconsistent.
But fine-tuning these blogs or themes is actually the complicated part. That's what I had to do. But I know a bit of coding and wanted to try. Not a great option for regular people.
And it'd foolish not to say that at the end of the day writing is more important than having a blog that's just beautiful.
There's one niche option I haven't covered there called [Aegea](https://blogengine.me/), which looks good out of the box, but I can't really recommend it based on the way the author develops it: no roadmap, no community feedback, basically no support, yet has paid features.
Many people (including me) use static generation with a fancy build process because we find it fun, not to save time or money.
I honestly find it more fun to setup my blog than writing content for it... Which might be a problem. (And also explain all the blog posts describing a complex setup).
Aside from taste being subjective, most of the tools mentioned are customizable. That is, you can tweak the markup and CSS to your own taste.
The post starts being concerned about aesthetics but then finishes with:
"Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough."
Finally, time is money. Spending an added hour (or two) with a build process (or whatever) isn't savings at all. If Goal #1 is to publish then anything that gets in the way should be avoided.
There are some solid points made, but the argument is inconsistent.