And thanks for all the fun. I’ve been posting (off and on) to this blog for a very long time. I have been contemplating moving to some other platform for several months for a variety of reasons (which I’ll get into), and now seems as best a time to do so. It’s been a fun ride learning WordPress and how to manage and support the platform. It was the gateway into learning Linux, a skill I now ply as my trade. Ironically, it is what led to moving away from it as well since there have evolved a plethora of ways to now host your blog in a very simple manner for no cost and with better security. I’ll outline the process on the new site in detail, but needless to say, it’s hard to argue when these new methods of hosting fix many of the downsides of WordPress, all while improving the user experience; there’s little value in maintaining a WordPress site.
If you would like to continue to follow my updates, you can find my personal blog and subscribe via RSS using the same link (if you need to know how to subscribe, check this out). I’m going to work on a way to cross-post to my Mastodon as well, so follow me there as well. And of course, family photos and such will be on Instagram for more personal stuff. This means you can find my posts, and they will be more focused for the platform and the topics that correspond.
As to why I’m choosing to do this, there are several reasons that have been brewing for months. Firstly, my hosting provider has been flaky at best, with the site sometimes being down more than up. I am using a basic shared hosting plan, so I knew going in that was a possibility of downtime, but it is frustrating to get the repeated alerts and have support state that it is not down but overloaded, as though that is still not an issue. Secondly, if you have followed any recent news about the direction of Automattic, WordPress‘ parent company for the commercial product, there have been a bunch of poor choices by their CEO that are doing real harm to the community support that, prior to these events, made him a star in the open source and web communities. Lastly, although maybe the most important reason, WordPress is notoriously insecure as a platform, and there is little chance of that changing any time soon due to the architecture of the system. So it makes sense to switch to a simple static website without the baggage of hosting a full database and web host and instead use plain text, written in Markdown and YAML, to easily post and update the site.
This site will continue to be preserved, albeit converted to a static site as well, so that I can reference posts and have it for posterity. But I’ll be closing down any WordPress related accounts and instead host it all in GitLab Pages.
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