Goodbye, WordPress

I have decided to say goodbye to WordPress. I have used WordPress for many years, and even hosted a few blogs on WordPress.org, but it is time try out something new. While WordPress worked for me and could potentially work for me in the future, there are simply too many unnecessary features. As my blog became more minimalistic over the years, and I kept the number of plugins to a bare minimum, I also found it easier to consider a lightweight solution in the form of a static website (i.e., no more PHP and MySQL). That is, a WordPress site is a bit of an overkill for my personal website.

I have decided to set up a new blog using Zola with the serene theme. I love the simplicity of Zola and how fast it is (it is funny how most of the tools I rely on nowadays for performance are written in Rust). It takes less than a second to build the entire site (with more than 1,000 posts). There are no additional dependencies and it is easy to get up and running. I use GitHub Actions to automatically build and deploy the site to GitHub Pages (I am, in general, relying more on GitHub Actions than Jenkins to deploy my work these days). And that is pretty much it.

To migrate all old posts, I used this tool in Rust to convert my WordPress XML export to .md files for Zola. The tool did a good job but there is still a lot of formatting to be done, especially when it comes to lists and tables. A lot of older posts will have some formatting issues and they will (hopefully) be fixed over time. Bear with me.

There are a few updates to how I will deal with older posts. First, there will now be a disclaimer on older posts that they are indeed old (e.g., "This post was last updated 500 days ago and may be out of date."). Second, if I make any noteworthy updates to old posts I will use the updated parameter to make it explicit when a post was most recently revised.

I feel much better about having all my posts stored as Markdown files on GitHub (I try to use version control for everything I do). I can now write and edit my blog posts in VS Code and get closer to doing all my work in one IDE (R, Python, SQL, markdown, you name it). I can even use GitHub Copilot to proof read my posts. I still have no plans of ever using AI to write any of my words, as it just feels wrong. There are also - at least for now - often obvious signs of AI writing, and I am not impressed by text generated by AI.

I do not blog as much as I used to. I guess part of it is in fact due to AI. The easier it is to do something, the less I do it. I could (in theory) write a blog post in a few seconds with the use of AI, or scale an idea to a series of blog posts using AI, but I do not want to do that. And more importantly, the fact that I could use AI to do something means that I end up not doing it all, even without AI (and the better the AI is getting, the more difficult it is for me to get novel ideas worth writing about). As the internet is slowly becoming populated with AI generated content, I do not feel the motivation to write a lot of posts.

Another reason is that I do not really care about putting myself out there anymore. In a past life I felt the blog was a great venue to share my takes on different issues, but I rarely feel the need to voice my opinion on an issue in any shape and form publicly. I still do like to have a blog though, and my plan is to continue to publish at least one post every calendar month (something I have been doing consistently since 2009). So while I might not write a lot these days, I appreciate having a setup where I can write about whatever is on my mind (without having to contribute to the DNA of a tailor-made digital hell, i.e., a social media site).

So, here we are. Goodbye, WordPress. Hello, Zola. Have a nice day.