When I first started a blog, in the early 2000s, it was under the French content manager. which basically works under PHP. That was mainly because I'd also moved our organizational blog to SPIP. The latter needed to be multilingual and to include right-to-left languages, and it seemed that SPIP had all the tools for that. In addition, it had been developed with a mind to developing a webzine or journal with collaboration with a team of editors, of the kind represented by the veteran multilingual leftwing journal Le Monde diplomatique, which still works under SPIP. It's a highly developed platform with many unique features and a following of talented users known as Spipeurs. Like the term, these are mostly French, and documentation is a bit lacking in other languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPIP Spip
https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr Le Monde Diplomatique
A weakness of SPIP was not having easy access to the vast ecosystem of readymade templates and plugins offered by the likes of Wordpress. Since for my own site I didn't need the complexities of SPIP, I quickly moved the site to Wordpress. As for the organizational site, it stayed under SPIP till a few years ago when it was eventually hacked. Like all software, SPIP has vulnerabilities.
Wordpress obviously has huge advantages, with its vast ecosytem, enormous flexibility, FOSS underpinnings and a strong, only moderately evil corporation behind it, together with the ability to either host on Wordpress.com's own site or to self-host. It's also extremely easy to move sites from one place to another or back to Wordpress.com itself.
But Wordpress is also a very bloated and complex system. Like many people I longed for something simpler. My first experience with developing a website for my organization had been with a static site under Microsoft FrontPage - a poorer competitor to DreamWeaver. Static sites were superceded by dynamic CMSs, but at a certain stage came back into fashion, so I started to look into static systems again for my blog. One that I worked with for awhile was Blazeblogger.
http://blaze.blackened.cz Blazeblogger
There were things that I didn't like about Blazeblogger. If my memory serves me correctly, every new page became an index.html of its own separate directory. Uploading was time-consuming and took increasingly more time the larger the blog grew.
I looked at Git based systems but these seemed overly complicated and somehow I couldn't get my head around them. However Git seems a perfect solution for syncing a local-first blog and, on the side of simplicity, is that some of these systems can use Markdown for composition.
I really appreciate the idea of local-first blog because it means that one always has a backup (or rather that the internet facing pages are actually a backup of what's local.
One method that I experimented with was to write the blog in simple html, sometimes using Seamonkey composer.
It was possible to set up collapsible headings using CSS.
I currently blog in emacs under org-static-blog, developed by Bastian Bechtold. It's a very simple system. Every post is written in emacs org-mode markup, which is almost as easy to learn as Markdown, and it is local-first: all posts exist as emacs .org plain text files, and are, in parallel, converted on publishing to html. No server-side language is required, so I can upload the whole thing to my Fastmail file storage via webdav. Fastmail file storage has no ftp or ssh access, but I am going to experiment with ways to automate the process.
https://github.com/bastibe/org-static-blog Org-static-blog
Advantages of org-static-blog
I have not been able to transfer all the posts from Wordpress into org-static-blog, so I have backed up the blog in two places: a) I used a WP plugin “Simply static”, and kept the (mediocre) static result available as blog.vikshepa.com and b) I've kept a private copy in a password-protected archive at Wordpress.com
Besides the blog, I also create files for a wiki-like system in Cherrytree notes, exporting the pages to html, and, as with the blog, uploading these to my Webdav file storage.