For years I have happily used WordPress.org to host my blog. I enjoyed writing articles, helping and interacting with people who take the time to read the longform articles. For a whole slew of reasons my attention to my blog decreased to almost zero. One of the big parts in that is the “Gutenberg Editor” or the “Block Editor” which suddenly appeared in WordPress. It made writing blogposts a horrible, cumbersome experience. Another frustration was the breaking of layouts of old posts because of “upgrades” to the theme I am using.
In an attempt to make editting text easier more enjoyable, I started looking for an alternative. I found Hugo to be a good candidate. It has a few pros and cons compared to WordPress:
| Pro | Con |
| Write posts in markdown. | Harder to host |
| 100% control of updates and layout | Migration broke a lot, repairs will take a while |
| No ads | No comments or user interaction (yet) |
As you might have noticed, I am hosting the blog on github pages now. It seems to work okay, and if needed I can should be able to more easily move to a new hosting location if needed, since all files are now pre-rendered static HTML. No PHP to hack, no servers to compromise, just plain HTML.
If you are a regular visitor of rolfje.com you already noticed quite a difference in layout. Older articles are mostly broken now, sorry about that, it will take a while to fix. I hope that this fix is a one time thing, making it truly future proof. There’s also new cool stuff: Go ahead and switch to dark mode by clicking on the sun in the header, or search for articles, or check out the rss.
Another big thing is the comments. I need to find a way to migrate the old comments into this site (if possible), and I also need a new mechanism for people to comment on my posts. The Hugo website mentions a few, I’ll try to see what works.
For now, please sit tight, or if you really need an old post go to https://rolfje.wordpress.com/, I’ll probably keep that around, at least until I migrated everything and have a way to forward visitors of that blog to this one.
Cheers,
Rolf
As you might have noticed, it looks very close to a WordPress blog here again. You are right, but not quite: I am playing around with a Classicpress setup and some protective measures around it on a hosted virtual private server. So far this feels better than the static site, I need a more interactive site I guess.
Lets see how this goes, enjoy it while it lasts 🙂
Ziet er goed uit, Rolf. Het duurde even voordat ik je nieuwste dingen via RSS binnen kreeg.
Hee Guus! Dank! Ik ben blij dat de RSS feed het weer doet. Het is nog even stoeien om alles weer geindexeerd te krijgen, mijn experimenten met github pages en markdown rendering hebben voor wat verwarring bij de grote search engines gezorgd.
De rolfje.wordpress.com site heeft nu een 301 forward naar rolfje.com, en alle URLs zouden moeten kloppen, dus het gaat wel weer goed komen 🙂
(mail werkt nog niet trouwens, het staat erg laag op mijn lijstje. Ik weet niet hoeveel mensen nog een “mailing list” volgen tegenwoordig)