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. 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.