New Year’s Resolution accomplished
One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2025 was to move my blog away from WordPress.com. The reasons for that should be relatively obvious, but you can read my most recent article about it if you aren’t up on the latest shenanigans around Automattic and such. It’s a disappointing tale, to be sure.
I had decided a few years ago that I was done futzing with new blogging platforms and was standardizing on WordPress. It was not a perfect platform, to be sure, but it was ubiquitous and seemed like it’d be stable for another 20 years. Obviously my crystal ball was not looking far enough into the future. 20 months, perhaps, but not 20 years.
Maybe something will arise from the WordPress community ashes. Certainly Mr. Mullenweg seems to be trying very very hard to set fire to it. But I think the moment for that is past. While there’s a big industry built up around WordPress, so far I’m not seeing any standard bearers to fork the project (ClassicPress notwithstanding) and lead it into the future. I’m still using ClassicPress for Zonker.net and WordPress (self-hosted) for my neglected portfolio site, but I expect I’ll migrate those as well to Hugo or some other static option.
So, I expect WordPress to just slowly fall out of favor and I don’t expect that there will be a single project or product that captures its market share. It’ll get stripped for parts, and the web will be worse for it. This is a disappointing turn for the open web, but that’s another blog for another day.
A funny thing
The funny thing about my resolution is that I had experimented with a bunch of static site generators before Christmas and then forgotten that I’d already done most of the work. Rather, I remembered playing with them, but totally forgot that I actually staged the final product and all I needed to do is twiddle the DNS. What can I say? Things get pretty hectic before the holidays.
So it’s Hugo. It seemed the best option of the bunch. If I decide otherwise at some point, all my posts are now in a handy portable Markdown format. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that—I’ve migrated this damn blog too many times over the years. Off the top of my head I’ve used (at various times) Slashcode, PHPWebLog, Blosxom, Octopress, Hugo (previously), and (many times) WordPress. But I’m stubborn about keeping it going.
Meet the new blog
So—here’s my new blog, same as the old blog, excepting the publishing engine.
Most of my writing energies go into LWN.net these days, but I’ll try to be better about blogging and pushing out things that are interesting to me but not good choices for LWN articles.