Exit WordPress

Jan 30, 2022 · 2 min read ·

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For years I have happily used WordPress.org to host my blog. I enjoyed writing articles, helping and interacting with people who take the time to read the longform articles. For a whole slew of reasons my attention to my blog decreased to almost zero. One of the big parts in that is the "Gutenberg Editor" or the "Block Editor" which suddenly appeared in WordPress. It made writing blogposts a horrible, cumbersome experience. Another frustration was the breaking of layouts of old posts because of "upgrades" to the theme I am using.

In an attempt to make editting text easier more enjoyable, I started looking for an alternative. I found Hugo to be a good candidate. It has a few pros and cons compared to WordPress:

Pro	Con
Write posts in markdown.	Harder to host
100% control of updates and layout	Migration broke a lot, repairs will take a while
No ads	No comments or user interaction (yet)

As you might have noticed, I am hosting the blog on github pages now. It seems to work okay, and if needed I can should be able to more easily move to a new hosting location if needed, since all files are now pre-rendered static HTML. No PHP to hack, no servers to compromise, just plain HTML.

If you are a regular visitor of rolfje.com you already noticed quite a difference in layout. Older articles are mostly broken now, sorry about that, it will take a while to fix. I hope that this fix is a one time thing, making it truly future proof. There's also new cool stuff: Go ahead and switch to dark mode by clicking on the sun in the header, or search for articles, or check out the rss.

Another big thing is the comments. I need to find a way to migrate the old comments into this site (if possible), and I also need a new mechanism for people to comment on my posts. The Hugo website mentions a few, I'll try to see what works.

For now, please sit tight, or if you really need an old post go to https://rolfje.wordpress.com/, I'll probably keep that around, at least until I migrated everything and have a way to forward visitors of that blog to this one.

Cheers,
Rolf