Goodbye Wordpress

I originally set up a free wordpress (https://leesjohn.wordpress.com) in 2013, which I updated slightly when I moved it to some cheap hosting on www.johnlees.me in 2019. The hosting was fairly unreliable and every year’s renewal I thought about moving. Maintaining a wordpress also takes a bit of effort and I also worried about eventually allowing it to lapse. Finally, I’d grown increasingly frustrated with the wordpress style of editing, which had made it difficult to write code and embed HTML, and really wanted to move to something more like text to write posts.

As I’ve copied some content to the group site anyway, I really just wanted this site to be my blog and a short about page. So I spent a few hours porting everything from the old blog over to this new site – there’s a few wordpress XML to markdown converters available which made this fairly easy. I have tried my best to retain and update as much of the old content as possible.

The site is now built with hugo and hosted by netlify. This is also how I made our groups’ site, and despite a bit of a learning curve due to the hugo tutorials only covering the very basics, I eventually got the hang of it.

(I’ve also previously used jekyll and paid hosting + ftp for https://poppunk.net/, but this required buying a template, and I find jekyll a bit more DIY than hugo)

Advantages:

• More modern style, better search, and site maps.
• Faster, cheaper and more reliable.
• More intuitive to write in markdown than in wordpress.
• https support.
• No yearly panic upon renewal.
• Now a git repository with full history and continuous deployment.

Changes

• All permalinks have changed URLs, sorry.
• There were a couple of embedded elements/plots I didn’t port over.
• No comments were carried over. I’ve also decided not to enable comments – they were rarely used, and conversation (if any) seems to happen on twitter.
• I don’t get wordpress’ nice analytics any more.

Despite some breaking changes, I am hoping this is a more sustainable solution me, and so far I definitely like the look a lot better.