Oct 11, 2022

Moving out of WordPress

I moved this blog out of WordPress. Don’t get me wrong, I still work at Automattic, but WordPress has too many moving parts for my needs.

Since I don’t need fancy templates, plugins, databases, comments, stats, a store, and much less dealing with security updates, backups, and hosting providers, I wanted to try a static solution.

It made a lot of sense. I could host it on Github pages and forget about security or hosting providers, and my posts would live in beautiful, clean markdown files.

Setting up Jekyll, importing a few posts, migrating my WordPress template to HTML, and connecting the domain took me a couple of hours. Pretty cheap for a super-fast, highly reliable, pure HTML blog, right?

Well, maybe, but I also spent two hours trying to post the above paragraphs from an iPad last night. 🤔

It went like this:

  • Purchase and install a good text editor with Files App support (Textastic).
  • Purchase and install a git client with Files App support (Working Copy).
  • Create a file by hand with a particular name.
  • Copy and paste some config options.
  • Write the post.
  • Add a picture to a folder.
  • Link the image by hand using markdown.
  • Create a git commit and push it to the repository.
  • Notice the attached photo was broken.
  • Remove the image.
  • Create another commit and push it to the repo again.

Pretty rough, huh?

I thought about switching to HEY World for a while, and although I don’t really want to loose the flexibility of having my own thing yet, so I’ll try to stick with Jekyll for a little bit longer, see what comes out.


Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash