Wagtail for a personal blog

I recently took some time off from working for a client. It freed up time for me to do stuff I really wanted. One of those things was setting up my own blog and portfolio website.

In keeping up with the latest AI developments I've come to be very inspired by people like Simon Willison, Cassidy Williams, Vincent Warmerdam. I also have the ambition this year to become more 'out there'. There's a number of reasons for that, but that's some fuel for another post.

Over the years, I've setup a number of Wordpress websites, for clients as well as friends. And even though Wordpress is fine and you click it together quite fast, it always felt suboptimal, clunky, and not customizable enough unless you pay for it. But I do admit I never spent time actually trying to make it work.

I read about Wagtail before, it seemed like a nice tool to improve that experience.

And it turned out quite well. It's exactly what I was looking for. I can use my Python skills, as well as have a nice interface to write.

If you follow the tutorial, you'll end up with something that looks like this website. It includes a blog, a portfolio and a contact page. I'll start adding content for those later as well.

I decided after the tutorial to go with the recommended Fly.io + Backblaze setup. This was easy to setup, apart from some required package versions not up-to-date in the tutorial. A newer version of Boto3 wasn't compatible with Backblaze so I downgraded that accordingly.

All that's left was that I had to fill up the website through Wagtail's CMS and we're good to go.

I haven't looked precisely into cost yet, but so far it seems that it'll be a bit cheaper than a Wordpress website.

Every second counts.