Back in 2013, I bought my first internet domain. I found a deal offering free web hosting and was excited to create my first blog! I didn’t know any web programming at the time, so I went with the most popular content management system, Wordpress. I set up Wordpress, installed all the useful plugins, and started to fill my blog with ideas.
Then one day, an unfamiliar flag appeared on my homepage, with some propaganda message mocking me that my website had been compromised. It turned out the Syrian Electronic Army had hacked my website (I’m guessing via SQL injection). What made it worse was that I hadn’t learned to backup my database at that time. Everything was wiped out.
Disappointed with the setback, I didn’t touch my blog again. Until today!
I recently discovered Static Site Generators: tools that create blog using static webpages. You write the content using a markup language called Markdown, and the generator will create a web page for you. The benefit is that all the content are statically generator before unloading to the server. That means no databases, no SQL injection, no Syrian flags on my homepage! More over, my site is now version-controlled by Git and uploaded to the cloud. No need to worry about being hacked anymore!