Moving off of WordPress!

Whenever I would write blog posts on WordPress a huge source of friction was just how shitty the editing experience was. You could write the post elsewhere and then try to upload it but I found I was frequently surprised by things not looking quite right once WordPress was through with it. The online post editing tool was also an exercise in extreme frustration. So I decided to simplify my life a bit. Now I host my own blog and use a static site generator Hugo to spit out plain ol’ HTML from markdown syntax. The reason I chose Hugo is that it’s easy to install (download an .exe) and supports the stuff I want (markdown, themes, aliases to map old URLs to the new markdown versions). A number of alternatives were ruled out simply because they requried me to install Ruby or NodeJS or PHP or Python etc. etc.

Another reason for moving off of WordPress is that it seems to have a new vulnerability every few days, and while I used wordpress.com which presumably fixes vulnerabilities rapidly, it’s annoying and icky to use software which is just of such poor quality. With static sites the attack surface is hugely reduced. Plus, it’s just more efficient to compile the static content once, at build time, and serve it up without any server side processing getting in the way.

Anyway, I’ve ported all the old posts to the new format. I’ve added aliases to all the old paths (I think, this was a manual process) so in theory any old links will just redirect to the new location. The old posts are also still available at http://sebastiansylvan.wordpress.com, but I won’t be updating that site anymore.