It was because I wanted to host and serve my website via Github Pages rather than go with a managed hosting provider. As my post exemplifies, that was a mistake.

Try laragon, it's so fun and easy to use, it's also portable.

https://laragon.org/

It needs more love.

I looked at it with excitement and realized that it’s Windows only. It doesn’t seem to have support for macOS or Linux, and the website doesn’t even have a standard “system requirements” section (or one I could easily find in the documentation).

Yeah it's only Windows, should have mentioned it, sorry. As requirements, I guess it will do fine in any decently powered windows box.

>That said I wonder why you’d need Github Pages if you’re already set up with Wordpress...

Maybe there's something I don't understand here? Wordpress.org isn't hosted, it's just the website software itself. Hence the need for Github Pages (although most people just use a hosting provider like Siteground).

But it’s specifically made to be a blogging software, to me it just feels like an extra step to convert your writing, unless the Github Pages ecosystem gives you lots of benefits.

wordpress.com is the site you want.

Static hosted site (secure, fast, etc), it’s also free?

That said, I personally would rather write in markdown or asciidoc and there are a ton of great static site generators for alternatives to Jekyll.