WordPress, really?

If you’re reading this blog post, particularly directly on my website, you probably noticed that it’s running on WordPress and that it’s on a new domain, no longer referencing my pride in Europe, after ten years of using it as my domain. Wow that’s a long time!

I had three reasons for the domain change: the first is that I didn’t want to keep the full chain of redirects of extremely old link onto whichever new blogging platform I would select. And the second is it that it made it significantly easier to set up a WordPress.com copy of the blog while I tweaked and set it up, rather than messing up with the domain at once. The third one will come with a separate rant very soon, but it’s related to the worrying statement from the European Commission regarding the usage of dot-EU domains in the future. But as I said, that’s a separate rant.

I have had a few people surprised when I was talking over Twitter about the issues I faced on the migration. I want to give some more context on why I went this way.

As you remember, last year I complained about Hugo – to the point that a lot of the referrers to this blog are still coming from the Hacker News thread about that – and I started looking for alternatives. And when I looked at WordPress I found that setting it up properly would take me forever, so I kept my mouth shut and doubled-down on Hugo.

Except, because of the way it is set up, it meant not having an easy way to write blog posts, or correct blog posts, from a computer that is not my normal Linux laptop with the SSH token and everything else. Which was too much of a pain to keep working with. While Hector and others suggested flows that involved GIT-based web editors, it all felt too Rube Goldberg to me… and since moving to London my time is significantly limited compared to before, so I either spend time on setting everything up, or I can work on writing more content, which can hopefully be more useful.

I ended up deciding to pay for the personal tier of WordPress.com services, since I don’t care about monetization of this content, and even the few affiliate links I’ve been using with Amazon are not really that useful at the end of the day, so I gave up on setting up OneLink and the likes here. It also turned out that Amazon’s image-and-text links (which use JavaScript and iframes) are not supported by WordPress.com even with the higher tiers, so those were deleted too.

Nobody seems to have published an easy migration guide from Hugo to WordPress, as most of the search queries produced results for the other way around. I will spend some time later on trying to refine the janky template I used and possibly release it. I also want to release the tool I wrote to “annotate” the generated WRX file with the Disqus archive… oh yes, the new blog has all the comments of the old one, and does not rely on Disqus, as I promised.

On the other hand, there are a few things that did get lost in the transition: while JetPack Plugin gives you the ability to write posts in Markdown (otherwise I wouldn’t have even considered WordPress), it doesn’t seem like the importer knows at all how to import Markdown content. So all the old posts have been pre-rendered — a shame, but honestly that doesn’t happen very often that I need to go through old posts. Particularly now that I merged in the content from all my older blogs into Hugo first, and now this one massive blog.

Hopefully expect more posts from me very soon now, and not just rants (although probably just mostly rants).

And as a closing aside, if you’re curious about the picture in the header, I have once again used one of my own. This one was taken at the maat in Lisbon. The white balance on this shot was totally off, but I liked the result. And if you’re visiting Lisbon and you’re an electronics or industrial geek you definitely have to visit the maat!