I'm moving the backend of this site to the sanity.io headless CMS. The old backend used markdown files in a git repository, and I wanted something I could easily use on my phone. (This site's frontend is still using next.js, which has been great.)

More importantly, I wanted to explore using sanity as the backend for some other sites I've been building and hosting for other people. I've been looking at a few candidates for replacing Perch, and so far sanity seems to be a great alternative. I also (mostly) love the idea of using a SaaS so I don't have to host it myself.

So far I've been really impressed with sanity. It's definitely a developer-focused CMS, so it requires coding to get up & running, but it's been incredibly easy to get started with. And querying for data from my nextjs frontend has been refreshingly straightforward.

I've moved this site from the Perch CMS to Next.js. This is partly because of Perch's uncertain future and partly because I wanted something more modern to work with. I quickly tired of dealing with Perch's PHP stack (which I don't know well at all, since I don't use it professionally), so I've been looking for node.js alternatives on & off for years.

Next.js was intriguing first of all because it's React based, but also because it offers a really nice range of options from static to dynamic pages. It seemed worth trying out, and I really liked it after some early experiments.

Right now I've started with a fully static Next.js site. I'll see how this goes. I'm considering migrating to a headless CMS for content management if I get tired of the static generation loop again; directus.io is my leading candidate (except for a bug that broke its SQLite support for now).

So far, working with next.js has been great, especially as it lets me use React. It's far easier than the PHP templates I was using in Perch. And... it's all Javascript now! :)

Perch's future looks uncertain, unfortunately.

As things stand there is not active development happening with Perch....

The product doesn't make enough money to justify two people working on it.

They promise at least maintenance-mode updates, but given that situation I can't use it for any new projects. Very sad. It sounds like the their business model just wasn't working out for them.

I finally added the ability to create picture posts. (I added that during the conversion back to Perch.) The intent is to enable me to post pictures quickly & easily, akin to instagram or twitter. It's just a first draft now. I'll refine it as I go.

I've given up on using Hugo for this site & finally moved back to Perch. The awkwardness of updating a static site just got to be too much, so I stopped posting. Now I can post quickly if I need to, and even update via mobile if I want to.

I'm using Perch Runway now instead of plain Perch. Runway's "collections" map perfectly to how I want to organize my content, and their developer pricing for a non-commercial site means there isn't a price penalty for using Runway. Thanks, Rachel & Drew!