…or not!

One of those lightbulb moments at 3am. I thought it would be a really good idea to take another look at Joomla, after all, I’ll be creating hundreds of fascinating articles that require a robust CMS - won’t I?

The Dream meets Reality

It’s unlikely that I’ll create more than a dozen articles a year, my need for a CMS is about as realistic as a political manifesto.

To justify waking at 3am, I had another look at Joomla; I remember why I ditched it. It’s a great system, but not for me: another case of spending more time managing the system than creating content. I kept returning to my HTML site, and I prefer the simplicity.

I’ll take another look at CMS when I’ve written my hundredth article and earned my first £million.

2024–08–25 - update

Spent most of the day looking at WordPress, Joomla and Drupal with a view to swapping back to one of them. The upshot is that I still prefer my ‘small web’ site.

December 2024 - further update

So, here I am - converted the site to Joomla. Found it a little quirky: inconsistencies displaying different tagged content, depending on whether the tag had been assigned to a menu or not. The site wasn’t being crawled particularly well by Google.

I decided to have a go at WordPress again. Converted the site (some 70 posts/pages) and got it up and running. Installed numerous plug-ins to achieve the operability I was looking for, and published it to the world.

I was never quite happy with the look and feel of the site. I’d used a template that I’d purchased for another project. It all seemed a little overly complicated and cluttered for what I needed. Searching for the perfect template proved fruitless (again).

From my perspective, the problem with WordPress is too many options and rabbit holes. There is a tendency to try to use all the bells and whistles, everything just gets too complicated and a chore to maintain.

When a hobby becomes a chore,
it’s no longer a hobby.

Back to the small web. Simple options, clean interface, complete control.

March 2025 - yet another update

I got my ‘small web’ HTML site back up and running, quite a bit of content; still feels like it’s not quite right, kind of 8/10.

  • The amount of content is growing, without a CMS it’s getting complicated to manage.
  • Trying to categorise stuff isn’t easy without a CMS.
  • No search facility.
  • Doesn’t lend itself to quick-blogging, each post requires quite a bit of coding to produce a consistent feel across the site, even with reusable components.

Hello Micro.blog

I gave this a try a while back, before the platform really had chance to mature, it didn’t really fit what I wanted back then.

I’ve now returned, giving it another try.

First impressions are good so far, I now need to decide how much of my ‘small web’ needs copying over.