@quirk i went with using grav which isn't per se blogging software but rather a much more robust and customizable CMS than wordpress - i had to do plenty of work to build up a template which would display posts with publish dates and tags etc and there's some idiosyncrasies but overall i felt it was more fulfilling than using blog software and not quite as crushing as making it all from scratch
@mavica_again Thanks! I will keep this as my backup option