WordPress has gotten a lot nicer since I last touched it in 2014.
The whole PHP/Apache situation is probably still as fiddly as ever so I’ve simply abstracted it all away by running this site using the official wordpress Docker images. MySQL on the host, /wp-content directory mounted-in.
Full Circle
My last wordpress post was in May 2014. Since then, I’ve dabbled with Bludit, Gollum, and Writefreely. Two things motivated my journey:
- I wanted to store all my content in flat files for portability and ease of backing up.
- I didn’t want to have to run a dedicated database process for the site to function.
To achieve the above, I had to give up:
- Date-based archives
- Categories
- Not absolutely manual media management
- Using an expertly designed theme that Just Works™ without me messing around with markup and stylesheets.
Writing incrementally
The biggest thing I’ve missed though, is the feeling that each new post is simply an increment and continuation of posts that come before it, both in time but also in concept.
It’s a silly thing really, but being able to easily see a post in the context of a subject matter or in a given month-year makes it so much richer. I’m not having to start from scratch, neither do I need to have everything figured out in one post because there will be to come.
All-in
So from here on, I’m all in with a much “thicker” stack than I’d like; trading-off technical un-complexity for the sake of motivating myself to create and share more.
I’m also in the process of consolidating more than 15 years of postings here.
- Posts from my pre-2015 WP site are already here.
- There’s an old MovableType backup on my NAS waiting for me to crack open – it’ll be a project in itself.
- Also, notes should really just be pages or posts on this site.
Should be good.