A brief story about moving away from Squarespace and into static site generation.
Welcome to Zombocom #
I’ve owned this domain since the early web days. I’ve never done anything fancy with it, just a portfolio. Back in 2013 Squarespace seemed like the perfect refresh, so I threw out whatever I had at the time and rebuilt the site using their service.
Over the years Squarespace has been… fine. Squarespace’s editor allows you to make “blocks” of content. Each block is intended to be one type of thing: text, an image, a gallery, etc. Blocks are powerful but if there isn’t a block for something you want to do then you simply can’t do that thing unless you host the content elsewhere and embed it in the page. Squarespace is convenient for someone who never wants to open a text editor, but inflexible for people who don’t mind getting slightly more technical. And for all that convenience you pay a pretty high price.
Enshittification #
Cory Doctorow coined the term “Enshittification” to refer to the trend of startups growing until they dominate the market then abandoning users to appease shareholders. The line must always go up, so this process is a danse macabre where the service grows more dysfunctional, chases trends, adds subscriptions, and eventually dies and gets buried in the graveyard of vulture capital.
I don’t think Squarespace is fully enshittifying but over the past decade it’s done things like add AI, pushed advertising campaign infrastructure, aggressively marketted its SEO tools, and tried to cement itself as a platform for a specific kind of corporate website. None of this is particularly appealing to me.
The price tag of Squarespace has, of course, increased to accomodate these additional services. No shade to those people who find it useful, but it’s increasingly detached from what I want. Also I’m not a fan of analytics, advertising, tracking pixels, persistent cookies, and anything that compromises privacy. I’m not sure how much of this data Squarespace collects (or sells), but it is closed source so who knows? Why should any visitors have to submit to this just to see some art?
I’m Tired, Boss. #
I remember sitting in a graphic design class and the prof talking about this new, cool thing called “CSS”. In those days people were authoring webpages by hand, or using WYSIWYG editors like Frontpage. Dark times.
Since those days I have had a little experience with web frameworks, but I’m no web developer. Besides, authoring and maintaining a dynamic web app for my own site seems exhausting. Using Wordpress also seems like overkill. I just want to show pictures and text and not worry about getting hacked because I missed some critical security update last week. Do I have to bust out a text editor and write HTML like it’s 1995 again?
Static Generation #
Thankfully, no. Static site generators are the answer. These are frameworks that allow someone to author content in markdown, then run a command that generates all of the files that are needed to render a modern page. Every time you change or add something you just run the command again. If you’re a developer and you’ve ever used auto-documentation systems like Sphinx, it’s similar.
All of this can happen locally on your own computer. Static sites are way simpler to host and serve and, as a result, static hosting is cheaper (or free, as mentioned below).
Once you get the hang of markdown it’s much faster than dragging and typing text blocks in Squarespace, which I found fiddly. You are also in direct control of all your files and don’t have to build everything through Squarespace’s UI, which at times seems like making a ship in a bottle.
It supports LaTeX formatting…
$$ \divideontimes \frac{\mathscr{if \space you’re \space into}}{that \space sort \space of \space thing} \divideontimes $$
and has a much wider range of supported content types than Squarespace. That’s just out of the box too, if you really want to dig into it you can basically do anything.
Hugo #
I tried a few of these and ended up landing on Hugo. Honestly, all the major options seemed pretty similar. Hugo had a nice selection of templates. I ended up choosing Blowfish.
Hugo written in Go, which is a language I don’t know and don’t care to learn. This doesn’t matter. I think unless you’re really going to get into the guts of your site generator the language is irrelevant. Creating a page in Hugo involves writing zero lines of Go. All the generators really boil down to downloading the generator, downloaded a template, creating a new project, and running a command to build the site. You are spengind most of your development time in a text editor, but not writing HTML.
Unfortunately leaving Squarespace means manually copy/pasting or otherwise re-creating all your content in markdown. Squarespace doesn’t make it particularly easy to export your site, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Markdown (and editing a few config files) lets me focus on only the content of my page, while giving me full control. I did write a few shortcodes to embed my demo reel and do some formatting, but this isn’t necessary.
Hosting #
The output of a the generator is a ‘public’ directory containing your site contents. This can get uploaded to a host as-is. If you want to get fancy you can use github or codeberg actions to automatically generate your site whenever committing the source code up to their service. There’s plenty of articles about that if your interested. I chose to just use ftp to upload my site.
Hosting the site on Github or Codeberg was a free option, but Github disgusts me these days. As for Codeberg, it seems like my site isn’t the kind of site Codeberg wants to be hosting. Codeberg pages are meant for open source projects, and they seem like nice folks on a budget, so I decided to just pay for a host.
I ended up choosing Porkbun as my new host and domain name registrar. I didn’t research this too hard, they had decent reviews and a good price. In fact the cost was literally a tenth of Squarespace.
The source code for me webpage is now hosted here. Any time I want to update I can clone this repo, author my markdown, run hugo, then upload the contents of the public directory to my host. Keeping the source online isn’t necessary, I just did it for my own convenience.
This was a long time coming, I’m much happier with this setup now, and the reduced cost is a great bonus.