As part of the migration, old links may be broken, but I built a decent 404 page that should help anyone who clicks a broken link.

After wanting to make the jump for years, I finally ditched Wordpress for a completely static site. I’ve always idealized the simple websites of the 90s and I wanted something extremely lightweight since day one. I went as far as I could in that direction with Wordpress, but I just couldn’t go any further. I got sick of managing upgrades and backups for what is a very simple website that I manage more out of nostalgia for my youth than anything, even business concerns.

Technical Reasons and Ramblings

I’ve had issues getting going with Hugo, Pelican, Jekyll, and a few more other CMS and Static Site Generators. Ultimately, I stumbled into Astro after hearing about Forestry and TinaCMS.

Astro scratches the exact itch I had. I get to focus on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I haven’t done this much HTML since I was a kid! It’s really enjoyable and make me wish I would’ve done more of this in my professional past.

Hosting, Databases, and Savings

The main benefit is that this hosting arrangement is dirt cheap. Static sites drastically reduce the operating cost as I no longer have to run two servers for Wordpress. Sure with this site’s traffic, I could’ve fit both db and web-server on one machine, but I wanted to do something much closer to an ideal configuration. I also wanted an excuse to manage a MariaDB install for the first time in years.

Getting rid of the Database is a big deal, as it represents a giant attack surface for something that doesn’t really gain me all that much. Honestly, the most valuable part of having that MariaDB instance was running Matomo against it. Now, the static site won’t have that advanced level of analytics, but it’s really not crucial at this juncture.

As a Static Site, I’ll be able to deploy this site for almost nothing. The most expensive thing will be the annual domain registration fee and I pay those way in advance.

Outro

Moving from Wordpress to Astro took me 2.5 workdays. It was a good Sunday project that just spilled over into Tuesday before dawn due to my excitement.

There are a number of small changes and feature improvements to come. With this version of the site, it will be much easier to extend functionality without bogging the entire site down.

All in all, it’s been a good change of pace, but, back to writing. These books won’t write themselves.