To say that my blog was gathering dust would be a bit of an understatement; the post before this one was written over 2 years ago.
Part of the reason for the lack of updates has undoubtedly been laziness, but part of it was also that I’m not a huge fan of WordPress. Over the past few years I have been using static site generators like Hyde on other sites, and in particular I much prefer to write anything longer than a tweet in a text editor rather than web UI, and commit it to git instead of a database. So, with a rather long article coming up, I finally decided to pull the trigger and rewrite the site using Hugo.
Getting rid of WordPress also means one fewer thing to update on the server, and one fewer thing using MySQL (another WP site that I just so happen to host is the only other thing left using MySQL; everything else is on Postgres). It also makes it trivial to geographically replicate the site to multiple servers, which is something I would like to experiment with.
I intend to update the site more frequently from now on, not just as a blog, but also emphasizing hierarchical content more. Let’s see how that goes.
Most of the content from the old WordPress blog has been migrated or re-written. One significant casualty of the migration are the WordPress comments. The old WP comment system had been closed for quite some time, as it was essentially getting only spam comments. Static site generators obviously do not support comments by themselves, so they had to go. Most of the comments on the old blog posts weren’t particularly useful (mostly due to their age), so I don’t think losing them is a huge deal, with one exception where I preserved the comments as part of the post.