Every personal site I built before this one died the same way. A CMS I stopped updating, a database I had to back up, a plugin that broke on a version bump. The fix was to make the site something I already maintain every day: a repository.
That part has not changed. There is still no server, no database, nothing to patch. What changed is the thing that turns the text files into HTML.
Why I left Hugo
Hugo — A website that is just files in a repository.
Still the fastest thing I have used for a site that is only pages. A full rebuild in about four hundred milliseconds, which spoils you.
Not for speed. Hugo rebuilt this entire site in roughly four hundred milliseconds. Astro takes about thirteen seconds for forty four pages. On that number alone I should have stayed.
I left because of what the site had become. It was no longer only pages. There was a chat widget, a photo slideshow with filters, a travel map, a search modal, a theme toggle, a consent banner. Every one of them was hand written JavaScript in a
