Reset

You may notice some changes to my website. I've decided to move away from WordPress and try out a static site generator called Publii. The best way I can describe it is as a self-hosted Medium blog. It's simple, but so far has just the right amount of functionality.

Why did I change? Because I got tired of the non-stop updates, broken plugins, and vulnerabilities in WordPress. I found myself not writing sometimes because I didn't want to hassle with WordPress. Also, I don't use 90% of the features it has to offer. I know some will say "You can find a hosted version of WordPress which makes it all easier", or "Why not just use Medium?" My previous posts should make it clear how I feel about trusting 3rd party services with my information and being locked in with them. And I'm not so interested in the audience that a site like Medium brings - I write this blog for me and to help whoever finds a hit through a search engine.

The conversion wasn't too difficult. Publii has a WordPress importer that easily brought in most of my articles.

The main problems I faced:

• The posts page showed blank due to a bug upon import. I had to open up the SQLite database and erase a few null rows in the posts table.
• I had to do some clean up for some custom formatting and image handling plugins from WordPress. I had to manually change the reference path for almost all images.
• Hidden posts on WordPress were imported and made publicly visible

The second item is pretty huge, so make sure you review your website before publishing it.

Aside from the technical work to migrate, it was also a big consideration for me. I went through all of my posts since 2014 - all of them. It was a big painful to read some of them. I thought about removing a lot of them, either because they are outdated, I don't like what I wrote, or I don't want people to see what I wrote. I decided to leave them alone, because it's a part of me and a part of my journey. So I just fixed a few typos, broken links, and made some minor updates.

Now, on to the future! And hopefully I'll learn my lesson from reading my old posts I don't like, and write better ones going forward.

P.S. The performance of Publii vs WordPress is awesome: