Leaving Wordpress
Published on Feb 25, 2024
Just about a month ago, I wrote that I was thinking about moving this blog off of WordPress and onto another platform. You may be able to guess where this is going, but I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about it, and more importantly hard at work on a new website, and I’ve come to a conclusion.
This will be my final post on WordPress.
I’ll get into the long-winded explanation of why, and start waxing poetic about how I’ll miss this era of the blog in a moment, but I should get some of the important details out of the way before your eyes start glazing over.
First: This blog is moving to theworksofegan.net! By the time I post this, that move will be complete! You can go there right now!
Second: If you follow the Dream Avenue RSS feed, you will need to go follow the new blog’s RSS feed in order to keep receiving posts in your reader of choice! This blog’s feed will not port over! Head there now or use this link!
Alright, now that all the important housekeeping is out of the way:
What changed?
When I last wrote about this, I was still on the fence as to whether I actually wanted to move or not. WordPress is simple, painless, and still quite cheap. Why would I want to move?
The long and short of it is that, while I had some reservations about workflow and upkeep, I’ve been feeling the pull of building and maintaining my own website for a few years now, ever since discovering Neocities in 2022. Then I found some solutions that assuaged all of my reservations.
The major factor was 11ty (eleventy), which is what’s known as a static site generator. It’s a tool that lets you build and update good, old static HTML sites really quickly.
I was hesitant to give 11ty a try, at first. I was most comfortable building a site with just Notepad, some HTML, CSS, and an open tab of W3Schools to get me by. 11ty felt just a little too tech-y. I would have to download Visual Studio Code to use it (you don’t have to, but it makes it easier), and run terminal commands. All the people talking about it online sounded like… I dunno, tech people. I don’t trust tech people, I’m sorry. Maybe that’s a prejudice of mine. Maybe it’s trauma from working at a startup.
And besides that, I don’t really love running something like that without understanding how it works. I don’t like when part of the process is “don’t worry about it” (despite the fact that the whole selling point of a platform like WordPress is “don’t worry about it”).
I also questioned whether using something like 11ty went against the whole ethos of coding out a website yourself in Notepad. It’s slow and hard and looks unprofessional, but that’s the point.
Then I actually gave 11ty a try.
To my delight, I was able to port over the site I’d been building from scratch in Notepad pretty painlessly. Once I had that up and running, I was able to see that 11ty is really just a series of scripts that allows you to build a completely modular site on one end — making it super simple to update a ton of pages at once — and spits out static HTML on the other end.
And it can still look unprofessional on purpose 😎
Why 11ty? Why Neocities?
I found Neocities in 2022, when people were talking about where to go after Twitter, and instantly fell in love. It’s everything I think the web should be. People making completely personal, super weird, totally non-corporate websites and vibing. I built a small site there using a framework I found called Zonelets, and have felt the pull to move my blog there full-time ever since.
The only thing stopping me was that the act of running a blog this way — manually updating HTML files, manually updating an RSS feed — seemed completely tedious. There’s no way I would ever want to do that, no matter how much I love the ethos or aesthetic. There’s just too much getting in the way of the writing. It just can’t compare to opening a draft in WordPress, writing, and then pressing publish.
In fact, I tried running a mini-blog that way at my Neocities site for a little while, complete with a functioning RSS feed. Getting everything to work correctly was very rewarding, but the thought of doing it “at scale,” as they say, is exhausting.
So I went back and forth on that for almost two years, until I found 11ty and, as described above, made myself try it.
11ty solves all of the problems I would’ve had with manually updating my own website. It does this by letting you create templates for different parts of your site — like the header, footer, metadata, etc. — and then letting you call on those templates where you want them to appear on your site.
So for example, you can create a template file that contains all of the metadata in your <head> tag, so that you only have to update that one file if you need to change something.
I probably could have recreated some version of that myself, more or less, with some JavaScript and a lot of patience — my early Neocities site used JavaScript to pull up a list of recent posts, handle navigation links, etc. — but that .js file would’ve ballooned out of control and probably slowed my site way down. And it probably still couldn’t have done everything 11ty allows.
The magic of 11ty is that once you’ve created your modular, templated site, you tell it to run, and it spits everything out as HTML files. It writes all of those templated parts to the HTML files themselves.
So instead of changing a link, or a title, or whatnot on 4 or 5 or seventeen different pages, I can change it in one file, and 11ty will write that change out to all the places it needs to go.
Having to update one little thing in a million places is a pain I’ve felt often while working on The Boktai Database. I’ll probably be turning my attention to getting that up and running on 11ty next.
The real power of this setup is that you can put all of a page’s surrounding HTML elements in a template, tell that template where to put the contents of the page, and then each page that calls that template as a layout can contain only the content you want to care about (i.e. the words and media in a blog post).
And the best part is: I understand it all. I get what it’s doing and pretty much how it works. It’s not the hoity-toity tech thing I thought it was. There was a learning curve, and I had to open my mind to new things (I downloaded node.js 😱), but it’s still just building out a site with code the same as you would in Notepad, and getting the machine to interpret everything the way you want.
It might sound complex the way I’m describing it, but it’s actually really intuitive in practice, and does everything in pretty much the ways you would want it to if you wanted to make building your own static website a whole lot easier.
So to summarize, I get to have my cake and eat it too, with the complete control over design and self-built ethos I was craving, and the ease of updating and posting that I needed to make that happen.
Looking back
While I’m resolved to pack up and move out at this point, there are still things about blogging on WordPress that I love. I’m definitely going to miss this era when it ends.
It kind of feels like moving out of your parents’ house. I’m going to be responsible for everything, no one’s going to hold my hand. You all remember moving out of your parents’ house and having to make sure your RSS feed was functioning properly by yourself for the first time, right?
I started using WordPress to blog in February 2021, when I moved The Go To Hell Space for a spell, and started trying to blog every day. That was such a fun time. My girlfriend and I had just moved in together, and my unemployment insurance hadn’t yet run out, so I felt free to dedicate a ton of time to blogging.
Those daily blogs were a lot of fun. I really miss blogging that way sometimes, not being able to be too precious about things, just having to find a topic and get some thoughts down.
After that, I moved back to Blogger for some reason. I don’t remember why (maybe money?), and I definitely don’t remember when. But then I moved back to WordPress again. I completely forgot I flip-flopped like that. But I had tasted a proper blogging setup, and Blogger is… not that.
Those early, daily blogging days also saw a lot of people follow me here on WordPress, which I don’t think I knew was a thing. I don’t know how many of them were bots, or auto-follows just looking for a follow back, or folks who started a blog in quarantine and gave it up soon after. But it still felt nice to see people responding and interacting with my posts. I’ll miss that.
I’ll also miss opening my WordPress dashboard and being greeted by a bar graph of views, which has shown a non-zero number almost every day since I wrote about buying the Disco Elysium jacket. I don’t know how accurate any of those numbers were, but it was nice to see. Again, it’s nice to have some confirmation or suggestion that people might be reading my words.
All of this, and the fact that WordPress is so damn stable and easy to use, and is still independently owned and supported by the same folks, and open-source, and all of that, just made for a really great blogging experience. It’s no wonder I stuck around for so long.
But now it’s time to move on to something else. I’m ready to take full control of my own personal chunk of the Information Superhighway and build something weird and fun, and to be able to change it whenever and however I want.
As of the time this post is published, The Works of Egan is online and fully operational, so come take a look, pull the new feed into your reader, poke around a bit and get cozy. Because I may be moving, but I’m not going anywhere.
Hope you wanted something to read.
Onward!