Site update

It's been a while since I've made any changes to the site, but it was time! I no longer believe in the mission of WordPress or its masters, Automattic. I've been getting fed up with the administration system and the editor for years - at least since the introduction of the block-based Gutenberg editor in 2019. (It's awful, and not even in a consistent way.) Now they're getting in bed with "AI" and pettily trying to control how others use their open-source software. I just don't want to use or support it anymore.

I've been using WordPress here since 2004 - over 20 years. You can see some of that history in the 'site' category, where I discuss moving from PostNuke and heavily customizing WordPress, and eventually falling into "standard" WordPress hosted by Automattic.

This is sad for me, because WordPress has been very important for the web, and I believe they're doing everyone a disservice by making the web less accessible. I spent a lot of time looking into alternatives. For me, it was a fairly natural jump to a static site generator (SSG), but I wasn't able to change over all of the sites I manage because less technical users aren't going to deal with SSGs. There are options like Publii, but since they don't support importing WordPress sites with very common options like dated URLs, they're not going to help millions of existing users.

I wound up with Zola - a Rust-based SSG with a decent templating language, Tera. I also tried Hugo, but its templating language is awful, and I would have had to do just as much work to support dated URLs as I had to with Zola, so it didn't make sense for me.

As for a host, I went with GitLab Pages because it has a generous free plan, automatic Let's Encrypt integration for TLS, the company isn't too bad (though they're also pushing "AI" too much), and I can keep my source files (Markdown, helper scripts, etc.) in the repo with the generated content. I'd rather use Codeberg Pages, but I prefer a private repo for this source, and I want to respect their requests around that.

This site no longer has any JavaScript, and I'd like to keep it that way. That means there's no longer a comment system. I have the old comments in an archive, but since there haven't really been any comments in years, and I can't find a comment system I love, I'm going without it for now. You can still contact me by email (you would have no trouble guessing an email address that would reach me) or Mastodon (link is also in the footer).

I tried to keep everything working as it was - redirecting old URLs, etc. I also maintained the GUIDs in the RSS feed, so hopefully your feed reader doesn't suddenly show old posts again; isn't that always annoying? I'm sure I made some mistakes, though; feel free to let me know.