Back on WordPress

As of today, after a twelve-year journey across various static site generators, this site is once again powered by WordPress.

In 2014 I started experimenting with content management systems beyond WordPress. First Ghost, then Jekyll, then Hugo, then 11ty, then Gozer (my own), then Astro. All of them were mostly great, but all had their downsides as well.

The reason I’m back on WordPress now is not technical. A static site comes with many benefits if you’re a developer: you get to edit posts in your favorite IDE, everything is in version control and hosting is free, simple and secure.

Those benefits eventually turned into a downside for me.

Writing versus coding

My IDE is for coding, not for writing. It is the same reason people say your bedroom should only be for sleeping: context matters. Every time I opened the site to write, my brain switched into engineering mode. Too often I would open up my site to write a new post, drift and suddenly find myself focusing on some technicality instead. Another redesign. Getting the build working. Moving stuff around so I could upgrade to the latest version.

Static is really static

You can host a static site pretty much anywhere, often for free. It is just a collection of files, after all. There is no database, no runtime, and no dynamic processing. That is part of the appeal.

It also has limits.

Want to show off a list of your GitHub repositories? You can generate it at build time, but it will not update until the next time you build and deploy the site.

Static sites are excellent when the content can be fully known at build time. Increasingly, I found myself wanting small dynamic pieces. Maybe a contact form, a comment section or some content generated from various API calls.

Of course there are ways around this. But every workaround would move the site a little further away from being a simple publishing tool, often requires a dependency on a third-party service and moves the site a little closer to being another software project.

It’s the content that matters

While moving this site back to WordPress it occurred to me that I was finally looking at and updating blog posts written well over a decade ago. I had spent years rebuilding the site around them, but not nearly enough time tending to the content itself.

WordPress gives me a place that is clearly for managing content. Not building, not configuring, not upgrading a toolchain. Writing. That matters more to me now than whether the site is statically generated, server-rendered, or deployed from Git.

I want this site to be boring again. WordPress is familiar, imperfect, flexible, occasionally annoying, and very good at being a place where words can live for a long time. Right now, that is exactly what I want.