Making a blog site

Putting content on the web used to be "easy" - write some HTML, serve it from a http server, and you're done. Crafting every page by hand becomes a pain though, especially when wanting to make sweeping changes to page design, or updating certain code blocks (like embeds from other sites)

Over the years lots of site builders and Content Management Systems have existed (like Joomla, WordPress, etc) but these come with the overhead of running "live code" for every request. Aside from the extra system resources needed to run these, they don't necessarily scale well and also bring about security risks and requirements for patching/updates. Such a headache!

A modern solution to this is to use a hosted product instead. Though these come with their own downsides of limited customisation, costs, data ownership and vendor lock-in, among others.

Another option is to simply pay someone (or a company) to design and host the site for you. But while a more personal arrangement, this can also end up more costly. For businesses, this can make more sense as you have that dedicated support without doing it yourself.

The final main option is to use a Static Site Generator. Something that takes some easier format to work with (such as Markdown or ReDoc files) and uses that content to generate HTML alongside templates (commonly a "theme"). SSGs often support flexible includes to a page ("modules", "snippets", "shortcodes" are some of the names used) allowing to easily re-use content across pages - such as for those embeds of other sites.

All of these options require hosting the content somewhere for others to view. For the SaaS solutions, or asking someone else to do it, that's covered already. In the case of CMS systems, that requires either specific shared-hosting that supports the language you're using, or running on a server of some kind. And for static sites (either in pure HTML or from an SSG) you still need a http server somewhere - but this can be far simpler shared hosting, or even things like GitHub Pages - and this can be easily scaled across multiple providers, or fronted by a CDN with no special requirements!

For this blog, the SSG route was the way to go. Specifically, this site is generated with Zola and built/hosted via CloudFlare Pages on the free tier.

Why Zola as the SSG? That's a separate post comparing some of the options...