This blog is a custom progam that I wrote back in 2013, updated a little bit over the years. My most recent upgrade is adding pagination, as the over 250 blog posts with high resolution images was far too large to load quickly on mobile. Page load performance is now much better.
The main index page is now 6.3kb of gzipped HTML, which loads in 22-30ms for me (and upwards of 200ms depending on AWS and my ISP). Users should see the page in about 1/10 of a second.
The downside of splitting the index page into many is that it's harder to search this blog. I'll think about adding search later, but that's a bit more of an undertaking than adding pagination.
I continue to write my blog posts in the same format I did in 2013, which looks like the screenshot above. They're plain text files with the first line being the title, the second line being the "slug" (part of the URL), the third line being the date, and subsequent lines are paragraphs. This is a deliberately stripped down blogging style that minimizes the effort required. Writing blog posts can be a bit of a chore sometimes, and the fewer distractions and simpler it is, the easier I've found it to put out new work.
My blogging platform is currently published on AWS Cloudfront. It's a set of compressed static HTML files (and supporting resources) that are pushed to an S3 bucket and then hosted on Cloudfront as a CDN. This blog runs just about as fast as is possible while still having some style to it (i.e. images, fonts, etc.). It's almost the most secure possible website, as it consists entirely of static files that have no dynamic elements to exploit. In nearly a decade of running this blog it's had no downtime (that I know of), no security problems, and serves pages at lightning speed.
I don't recommend writing your own blogging software, but it's nice to have complete control over the experience, and it's easy to have just the right level of features to support my readership and writing. I hope you've enjoyed reading it as I near the tenth anniversary of writing about my practice and cryptocurrency.