This must be my third or fourth attempt at building, maintaining and writing in a blog. One of the things I wanted to try this time is not running an elaborate system for blogging, and instead trying to go with the simplest possible route.
In the past I tried running Wordpress and Ghost in a cloud instance, and even though it makes the writing experience nice for a bit, the whole thing goes stale quite quickly. You have to deal with updates, potential vulnerabilities, the whole plugin ecosystem, OS upgrades... You could go for a SaaS too, but I wanted to give simple static pages a try.
Most of those are built nowadays with Javascript, though, and I really would prefer not dealing with it and its ecosystem, if possible. I don't enjoy that aspect of the web that much. Instead, I tried to look for an alternative built in Python (which I'm dealing a lot with currently at work). That's how I found Pelican, which seems to be okay so far. I've modified a bit the CSS and templates from the default theme, and called it a day. The site is super simple so far, but it seems to also have support for things like syntax highlighting, SASS (if I ever wanted to go down that route, which I doubt) and some other stuff that might prove useful in the future. I guess I'll get there eventually. I might try to code some plugins myself, sometime.
As for the hosting, angelmm recommended Cloudflare Pages, which so far has been easy to use and setup. No concerns there, and it all falls in the free tier.
Anyway, one of the things I want to try differently this time is focusing more on content than on the blog itself. It's been the case multiple times already that I try to start a blog and end up spending much more time in the blogging platform than on actually writing content.
For me, the purpose of having this blog is to share more of my thoughts publicly (which I feel is one thing sometimes I struggle with), share ideas that could be useful to others, or clarify my thoughts on a topic (something I've found writing helps with). With those, it makes sense the focus should be in the content, not in the site.
The version you're seeing at the time of writing this is how it is going to stay for a while. I might add a few pages to add links to stuff I consider useful but don't fit on the article format (some ideas I'm shamelessly getting from this blog), but that's about it.