Why I moved my notes from a CMS to plain Markdown
For a long time this site ran on a classic database-backed CMS. It had an admin panel, a plugin ecosystem and a steady stream of security updates that I had to apply for a site that received a few dozen visits a day.
The maintenance tax
Every layer is something to patch: the web server, the language runtime, the CMS, the theme, the plugins. None of it was hard, but all of it was recurring. Over a year I counted eleven updates that were security-relevant and zero that improved anything I actually used.
What replaced it
Now every page is a Markdown file in a git repository. A small script turns them into HTML and a directory of static files is copied to the server. There is no database, no login form and nothing executing on request.
- Write the post in a text editor.
- Commit it. Git gives me history and backups for free.
- Run the build, check the output locally, copy it over.
Trade-offs
There is no comment form and no preview-in-browser editor. Search is a client-side index generated at build time. For a notes site that is a fair price: pages load instantly, hosting costs almost nothing and the attack surface is a file server.
If you only publish a few pages a month, ask whether you really need a dynamic backend. Most of the time the answer is no.