I started making a spreadsheet of all the 100 Mountains of Yamagata a few months' back, and today it sent me down a bit of a wormhole looking for a way to turn the information into a website straight off the spreadsheet. I found one way to do so through Wix. Squarespace you probably could do it, WordPress as well, but I couldn't find an easy way to do so on either, or a way that doesn't involve coding. Wix had a database feature that did exactly what I wanted.

This changes everything. With this, it would be extremely easy to populate a website with hundreds of pages in a relatively short amount of time. I wouldn't be surprised if using databases in this way was what people were already doing and I just didn't realise it, but this thinking only came about because I thought the pace at which I was adding mountains was way too slow, and I that I should just add them without actually having climbed them. The aim is to help people by giving them a resource to climb the mountains themselves, and I can do that without having climbed them myself, there's plenty of information out there, only it's all in Japanese on a pretty old website (yamagatayama.com).

This blog and the mountains of Yamagata blog are both made using templates, but they come with the (in my opinion) huge disadvantages of WordPress, which are that there are so many moving parts just to do simple things, any of which could easily crash the website, and you also have to pay separately for everything. WordPress is like Frankenstein's monster in that regard. It is of course entirely controllable, but this demands a lot of background knowledge, and being able to populate a website using a spreadsheet to me is a game-changer (if I decide to go through with it of course). I also calculated the costs I was spending on hosting, an SSL certificate (that doesn't work properly) and my domain. Wix came out either a similar price or even cheaper (after the first year you have to pay for your domain, which I think makes it more expensive).