So long, WordPress!

tl;dr: I’ve moved my last site off WordPress, and also off AWS! Yay! I'm using 11ty! 11ty is great! Yay! Also using Pagefind for search, and authoring blog posts using Obsidian.

Ancient History

I've had a version of this web site since 1994, at which point, it was just some hand-written html pages hanging off blues.epas.utoronto.ca\~jankowsk. That site ran on an SGI Indigo, so IRIX was the first *nix I got to know. For a while, the main page was called “Chester's emusic page,” and I thought about purchasing the domain emusic.com, which was available at the time–that would have been smart! Interestingly, a friend of mine from undergrad days later went on to be the CEO of emusic.com (“Hi, Chris!”).

After I finished my doctorate in 1997, we moved to nyc and I had to find a new service provider. Those were the days of little mom & pop ISPs, and I went with one called OnePine. Around 2002, I had a Linux server at home and started self-hosting. It was still a static site. In the fall of 2004, I started this blog, running on–of all things!–slashcode, the server for slashdot. (Which, by the way, kudos to them for having a web site that still looks the same thirty years later!)

The announcement for running slash became this site’s first blog post. Things chugged along for quite some time, but slash was kind of a pain to admin. So, like pretty much everyone, at the end of 2006, I migrated the site to WordPress, as announced here: What's up with the blog, anyway?. At that point, there was no auto-importer, so I had to dump all the slashcode posts from mysql and create new posts in WordPress. Fun!

The AWS era

At some point in the teens, everything had to run on AWS, so I migrated everything over there. By this point, I had a few sites, including cyberkrunk, my home site, Nora’s home site, and, later, culturednyc. AWS was a good skill to have for work, and I got certified in it. All fine. The ec2 instances would freeze fairly often, so everything took a fair bit of hand-holding. When everything just had to run on Docker, I ran everything on Docker. Again, fine, but not really worth the hassle for this use-case. After a while, I went back to just using LAMP stacks.

SSGs, or “Falling in love with the web again”