Overly complicated software is the bane of my life, so for my own corner of the web I want things to be extremely simple. That way, I'll have a better chance of understanding what's going on.

At the moment I am strongly in favour of the flat file CMS approach, because it's said to be easier to understand how it works. I've been rummaging around the web for a while now looking at different blogging systems; this post is a round up of what I've come across and what I've actually installed and used.

I tried Anchor and Flatpress side by side for a month.

Anchor is very lovely to look at, but it's not really flat enough. I struggled to understand how it did what it did.

Flatpress, while much simpler, was a bit clunky (BBcode), and it didn't seem straightforward to edit the available themes to achieve what I wanted.

(Neither of these, by the way, made it particularly easy to transfer data to another setup. It was doable, but if one had hundreds or thousands of posts, eccchhh.)

I installed and then uninstalled Grav in an hour - it wouldn't run on the server I use.

For now, I'm using Pico. This means that blog posts are written in Markdown, or to put it another way, blog posts can be written on any text editor. It's also extremely straightforward to upload posts; you just need an SFTP connection. On my phone, for example, I can use the text editor built into ES File Explorer, and then switch to the remote filing systems tab in the same app to upload a post.

On the horizon but not yet tested (because Pico, for the moment, suffices) are Singularity, blacksmith, and Wintersmith. These is also a rather long list of flat file CMSes here.

In my search for minimalist blog software I also came across a whole bunch of super minimalist alternatives. Sites which host your content and deliberately eschew all frills.

There are many more, of course. Isn't the internet grand?

And of course one must not forget the points made so well here and here.