Who dis?

Starting fresh can be somewhat jaring, with questions such as what do I take with me to my new site?
For me the question is quite simple to answer, almost nothing.

Why leave WordPress behind?

After years of managing my Wordpress-site, I found myself spending more time fighting the platform than creating content. The constant updates, plugin-conflicts, security-patches, and chasing perfomance became a chore rather than enabling creativity.

As a backend-developer, I appreciate simplicity and performance and WordPress felt bloated for what I actually needed; a place to share my thoughts and projects.

Enter Hugo

After comparing several static site generators such as Astro, Hugo and others, Hugo appealed the most to me for several reasons:

  • Speed: Blazingly fast, and given that I have static content anyway this was a no-brainer.
  • Security: No database, no PHP-vulns to worry about.
  • VCS: Everything is in Git, even the content
  • Simplicity: Markdown, since I already write a lot of technical documentation in markdown, I’m right at home with this one, and it works everywhere.
  • Performance: No server-side processing needed.

The “fresh-start philosophy”

Instead of migrating old content, I’m embracing a blank slate. So I can purely focus on writing and not migrating content and digital clutter, and making sure it works.

This gives me a space to focus on quality, clean readable content, and better organization from day one.

The technical migration

For those curious about the technical side:

Export considerations:

  • WordPress XML export is messy and require heavy cleanup.
  • Images, assets, would need to be reorganized.
  • URLs will change (fine by me)

Hugo setup:

  • Chose PaperMod-theme for its simplicity.
  • Set up automated deployment.

Moving forward

A fresh start feels liberating, no legacy baggage, no “I should take the time to update WordPress and make sure everything works”.
Just a clean slate to document my current journey in life and as a developer.

I intend to post about:

  • My mechanical keyboard projects, and other projects that I do.
  • Backend-development insights.
  • 3D-printing adventures.
  • Life.
  • Whatever else catches my interest.

For other WordPress-refugees

If you’re considering a similar move:

  1. Don’t feel obligated to migrate everything - be selective.
  2. Embrace the learning curve - static sites think differently.
  3. Start simple - let it grow organically and add complexity along the way.
  4. Focus on writing - the tooling should fade into the background.

Welcome to my new digital home. Let’s see where this journey takes us.