How I moved away from WordPress (to something much better), part 1
Ever since I started blogging in the early 2000s, I always managed things myself, whether it was just FTP’ing static pages to a wwwroot folder or running my own instance of DNN, Community Server, WordPress, .Text and/or Subtext, or one of the other blogging platforms of the mid-to-late 2000s. That changed a few years ago when I decided I no longer wanted the headache of managing my own infrastructure and I moved to WordPress.com. That’s where this particular blog was hosted since its inception. I figured the $100 per year was worth it, so I happily kept renewing my account.
I was on WordPress for a few years, but it seemed like every time I wanted to do something cool with my blog, WordPress wanted me to upgrade my account. There came a point where I started getting the itch to be more in control of things again, and to reduce how much I was spending. I had planned a slow transition away from WordPress to my current platform, but knocked it out in about a week back in 2022.
The 50,000 foot view
Like I said, WordPress was nice, at least until it wasn’t. Since I’m a developer, I didn’t mind getting my hands dirty, BUT I also wanted to avoid dealing with servers and operating systems and patches and…
In the end, and not to spoil the rest of the series too much, this blog is now statically generated using Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator. It’s built using GitHub Actions, triggered by the creation or change/acceptance of a Pull Request. The site is deployed to a Static Web App on Microsoft Azure. Not only do I have the “production” site, but I also have a preview/staging site so I can make sure everything is working before I publish something.
Total cost per year to operate?
$0
CMS to SSG
I remember talking to a friend sometime in 2022 and he mentioned that his blog used a static site generator. I don’t recall which one his used, but it sent me on a quest to figure out if one would work for me, and if so, which one.
Once I grasped what a SSG was, I realized that it was the perfect fit for what I was doing. There’s nothing dynamic about this site. There’s no reason to have the overhead of a database, or some special editor to compose posts. With a static site generator, I’m dealing in text files. For example, you can write everything in markdown and the SSG converts them to HTML. Once a page or blog post has been generated, it never has to be generated again unless something about it has changed.
I don’t know how I stumbled on Jekyll, but after reading the docs, I decided to give it a shot. Since I already had Ruby on my Mac, it was easy to install:
gem install jekyll
Creating a new site was as simple as
jekyll new ssddblog
and once I had the default site created, I could run the server and access the site on localhost:4000.
bundle exec jekyll serve
I fiddled around it with it for a day or two, trying to understand how to configure it, and most importantly, how to get it to look the way I wanted!
The only maintenance I really need to do is an occasional
bundle update
Coming soon
In the next post, I’ll talk about where and how I host.
Part 3 will show how I moved my content from WordPress, and part 4 will discuss how I manage everything today.
Final Thoughts (for now)
I’m happy I made the move from WordPress. Not only am I saving a bunch of money every year, I’m also not worrying about updating plugins or keeping the infrastructure up-to-date.
Using a Static Site Generator for my blog makes sense. It’s lightweight and I can host the generated site anywhere. I can also switch to another SSG quickly and easily if I ever decide I’m tired of Jekyll.
Thanks for reading!
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