The previous incarnation of this was site powered by a static site generator (SSG). More specifically it was running Eleventy, because I loved the thought of managing all my updates in Markdown. You can read the details of how it ran on the old site, but the material is outdated. (Someday I’ll also article how all laws and contracts should be written in Markdown, but I digress…)
The problem was the maintenance of the pipelines. The site was fast and secure, with great SEO, but I was spending more time tweaking the packages and webhooks than what I should be doing – creating new content.
My previous concerns about running the website of a dynamic site generator, like WordPress, boiled down to three areas:
- Ability to keep the site secure
- Ability to keep the site fast
- Concern that nobody would consider me “cool” if I was running WordPress
Over the last several years, I [shockingly] didn’t receive any awards or celebrations in my honor for running semi-obscure open-source software. Surprising, right?
I also became savvy with running Cloudflare in front of my website. Although I don’t have some of the really fun enterprise Cloudflare features, their free plan still lets me do the basics of:
- Caching and serving content when/if the AWS server goes offline
- Blocking hackers that are trying to break in
- Making everything really fast
Other benefits, beyond not having to constantly update NPM packages and repair broken GitHub pipelines, is that I can do some integrations with Bluesky, which I (and most early Twitter adopters) hopes takes off. Right now I’m using the amazing Neznam Atproto Share plugin, which has a rough name but exactly the functionality that I want to choose when/if I post to Bluesky. I’m also writing a WordPress plugin that replaces the existing comment system will Bluesky comments, based on Emily Liu’s brilliant work. Once I have a couple other posts out the door and confirm its working as expected, I’ll make it public for others to try.
Hopefully there won’t be many more posts about what’s running the site. Nobody finds that stuff interesting. But thanks for indulging me while I got this off my chest.