New Website Architecture

Goodbye WordPress #

I started this site with a goal of posting more blogs and less social media posts. I wanted to share projects I was working on, solutions I found, and whatever else came to mind. I started hosting the site on WordPress because I thought it would be easy to publish content. For a number of reasons, it turned out not to be the case. I’d decided to fix that.

Hello HUGO #

The hosted instance I was using was slow and cumbersome and really overkill for a site like this. There has also been quite a bit of drama surrounding WordPress lately and I don’t want to get caught up in any nonsense. A while back, I read about static site generators. After a while, I settled on HUGO. It turns ordinary markdown files into html files in almost no time at all. It supports theming, but is also highly customizable. HUGO also has a development mode, where you can run a mini web server on your desktop machine while you make edits and see the changes appear before your eyes (and, importantly, before you publish).

I grabbed my content from my wordpress install and, after a bit of python and some fiddling, I had it translated into markdown files for HUGO to translate back to html. Seems a little circular, but well worth it. There is no need for any databases or complicated back end systems. And the resulting static site loads wicked fast.

The new site is great, but I still need some of the features offered by WordPress. I want the ability for people to comment on my posts, so I turned to Comentario, a free and open source comment engine that I could self-host. I also want analytics without having to give all of my information to Google. For that, I am using Plausible, which is (of course) also self-hosted.

So far, it’s been working well. I’m hoping this will make it easier for me to post in 2025 and beyond. To help with that, I’m working on an automated publishing process - more on that later.