Andy Baio The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams:

In June 2023, the servers just started returning errors, making nine years of member contributions inaccessible, apparently forever — every post, artwork, song, portfolio, and the community built there was gone in an instant.

How did this happen? What happened between the idealistic manifesto above and the sudden shutdown?

It’s a story so old and familiar...

Ello was fun for a while, but like so many others became just another reminder that manifestos and good intentions are often meaningless in the long run.

So a few days ago I moved this blog back to Hugo. I like Kirby, but I missed the "standard" Markdown frontmatter and my old Emacs workflow. I prefer a fully static website, so Hugo makes sense.

Except no. Hugo would be perfect if all I wanted was to grab a theme, render static pages and push them to a web server. But heaven forbid I want to make any changes to the site's behavior. Even after years of using it, I find Hugo's template system and language to be an unfathomable and confusing mess. Maybe I have a mental block, but nothing I do works on the first (or second or third...) try. There's a lot of documentation, but I can't make sense of it.

One thing that put me off Kirby CMS was that its "Kirbytext" markup enhancements to Markdown would make the content less portable. Thing is, Hugo suffers the same problem because every theme developer uses their own front matter variables. Is it "cover" or "featuredImage" or "feature" or what? And Hugo's shortcodes are just as much a risk of lock-in as Kirbytext. Hugo's advantage here isn't as great as I thought it was.

So, you may have noticed I've rolled back to using Kirby. Even though I had to build most of it myself, I feel like I understand it. Also, I like the design and behavior more than that bare-boned theme I was using. And if I want to change something, I'm not afraid to try.