Why this blog is just static files

2026-08-16

I tried a couple of blogging engines before settling on the most boring option: hand-written HTML and one stylesheet, served by nginx.

Reasons, roughly in order of importance:

• Nothing to patch. No database, no plugins, no admin panel exposed to the internet.
• It is fast. A page is a few kilobytes; HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 do the rest.
• It will still work in ten years. Browsers are very good at rendering HTML from 1999, so they will be fine with HTML from 2026.

The whole site lives in a git repository. Publishing is one command:

rsync -av --delete site/ server:/var/www/blog/

The only moving part is the TLS certificate, which renews itself.