I'm an occasional blogger. I've played with several systems over the years for blogging and this is my current setup for 2026, and how I got here.

Version 1: Hugo

My first real attempt at blogging was self-hosted using a static site generator called Hugo.

This is a good tool for generating static sites using simple markdown. It is however very complex, with multiple layers of abstraction that I never really got my head around. While Hugo is super-fast, using it was slow as it always took me a while to work out how the abstractions work. It was also not very good at generating succinct HTML. Hugo has a tendency to in-line lots of CSS and javascript, which made the pages way larger than they need to be.

Version 2: Medium

I then moved over to Medium. This is an all-in-one blogging platform that promises to allow you to monetise your work and to promote your writings.

Medium is a nice platform to use, but getting traction, especially for the occasional blogger like myself was never really going to work. I decided to move back to hosting my own blog.

Current Tool: Eleventy

Eleventy is another static site generator like Hugo. The difference is that it is a much simpler tool but still does everything you want from a static site generator.

  • Templates are simple .njk files (HTML + template syntax).
  • CSS is normal with no special sauce to learn.
  • All content is via markdown files. Templates can be used to format sections or repeating elements.
  • Easy to integrate with standard CI pipelines for publishing.

What's better is that being code-driven it is easy to integrate with AI.

Here's how AI helps:

  • I have a CLAUDE.md file for creating a template for each blog post. I just have to ask "Create me a new blog post titled ....". NOTE: This creates the shell, not the blog post itself.
  • I can use Claude to proof read my post.
  • I can instruct Claude to make me a prompt for Gemini to generate a hero image. I could automate this further, but I like a bit of manual control at this stage.

This frees me up to spend more time writing letting the tools help me with the less-human aspects.