Long ago, I spun up a WordPress server here on my personal domain; at the time, it was the thing to do, and my hosting provider had a single-click option to provision it, so… done.
Over time, it became less attractive to me as a place to write:
- WordPress decided to keep pushing their WYSISYG tools that I find really frustrating to work with. I much prefer writing markdown files in a real editor.
- The idea that every request made to the site requires a bunch of database queries and re-rendering static content is absurd.
- Having my content stuck in a database instead of as directories of files is unappealing to me
- The CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has undertaken some really bizarre actions against a hosting provider.
More and more of my time was spent putting stuff on Twitter (RIP), Facebook, and other corporate silos. When Musk took Twitter over, it didn’t take long for the changes he made there to convince me to nuke my account. On any given day, I’m about that close to doing the same on the Meta platforms.
After thinking about it for a long time and reading pieces and sites like:
- IndieWeb: “a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.”
- More specifically, the idea of POSSE as an approach to own my content but make it available
- We Need to Rewild the Internet: “The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.”
- Molly White’s Call To Action: “researcher, writer and software engineer Molly White argues it’s time to reclaim the web: move your work to spaces you control, support open tools, and help build a web that serves people, not profit.”
- Andy Matuschak’s idea of Evergreen Notes and “working with the garage door open”.
- Maggie Appleton’s piece on Digital Gardens
I decided to start over here.
I knew that what I wanted was something based on open formats and standards where I can tweak things to act exactly as I want them to because the systems are intended to be extended easily. I researched all of the available static site generators and settled on the Python-based Pelican.
I exported all of the posts from the old WordPress site and migrated the important ones here, added some new ones, wrote a handful of small scripts to manage things, and here we are.