CMSes and static content generators

I've been looking into static generators lately - like Hugo, Jekyll, and so on. I've never been happy with any CMS I've ever tried - and I've tried them all. BP itself has ran on News Publisher, Serendipity, Drupal, WordPress, and probably 3 or 4 others that I've forgotten about. They've always felt out of my control, and hard to backup and restore if it comes to that. Most CMSes I've tried run on MySQL on my hosting provider, and I just don't like not having control of it all.

Now, it (the blog you're reading) is built from a Hugo project on my desktop machine. Static files, no database, nothing to lose. Unless I lost the source, which would mean losing a lot of other stuff that's more important. But it's backed up to an external hard drive, and a Backblaze account. Was also backed up to Mozy Home as a 3rd option, until Carbonite bought them and, well. Dunked them in carbonite.

The only thing that makes it harder is that I have to write into markdown files that are stored on that computer, so I can't write from the web or from work remotely. (Basically every note-taking app, markdown editor, cloud storage/service, and RDP itself are blocked.) So now I'm experimenting with markdown editors and trying to figure out how to do this. I picture including a lot of links, and I tend to see those at work day to day, so I need some way to log them for inclusion in blog posts later - even if I don't comment on them until I'm at home.

I'm also using Pico for my Commonplace book, though there still isn't much there. I'm just not big on notes. I never know what sort of things to include that I won't remember later that would be useful. Pico is cool, but it's not quite suited for a blog from what I've seen. So I needed something that could do bloggy things like categories, tags, pagination. I've used Hugo for a different personal project, so that drove me to just use it here too.

Other things I tried before Hugo: Ghost (wouldn't install), Grav (npm wouldn't build it for some reason), Nikola (couldn't get the server to cooperate with python 3 + couldn't use the required version of pip)

That's where I'm at.