Automad

Monday, March 8th 2021

The backbone of this website is called Automad (Website, GitHub).

It's a flatfile CMS, meaning it doesn't need a database. It's lightning fast, isn't it? You can also install themes, I decided for Revitron.

Why I decided against a database? Simplicity is charming. My hosting includes multiple databases (and I use them for other projects), but I just wanted my own website lightweight, simple and performant.

Being a lightweight solution, one could think there are some drawbacks. The only one I found is that the community is smaller than the ones of some similar projects. In consequenze there are just not as many themes and add-ons as for other CMS. Nonetheless I found a theme that fits my imagination (link above).

I tried out an even more barebones framework before Automad, which is called Dead Simple Blog. The name describes it perfectly. Content is created by dropping a textfile which has a date as a name. Formatting is done by markup language. Very cool concept, what held me back from finally using it is that I couldn't customize it without digging into the code (which may likely not be a problem for more experienced individuals). The test site's still up, check it out if you like: ludix.io/deadsimpleblog

Automad and Dead Simple Blog are indeed opensource projects.