Returning to WordPress

For about eighteen months, between late 2010 and early 2012, I maintained a blog at this address.

Busy with a new job, and with my attention supplanted by social media, I stopped writing. My site sat, neglected as time passed. Two years later during a server rebuild, I threw a placeholder page up with the intent of creating a new website.

In late 2014, in an inspired sprint of feature development, I added the link to kitte.nz, another unfinished project of mine.

I certainly didn’t want to keep running WordPress. Nobody cool uses WordPress anymore, all my friends build their sites out of static-site generators and host them on Github pages.

I was playing with rendering html pages and uploading them to S3 buckets then fronting them with Cloudfront so they’d load fast and have SSL termination. Static-site generators were the way to go. Of course I couldn’t use Jekyll, I had to use one that was written in Python. I started with Tinkerer, and some point I moved on to Pelican. I had a brief fling with Lektor — I was entranced by its built-in ‘admin interface’, which is a pretty amazing thing for a static-site generator to have.

Not that I ever got around to publishing anything. I never got to the point of actually making a choice, and my decision fatigue from the surfeit of options cost me months, then years.

My ability to be creative, and to communicate in forms longer than a tweet or a Slack channel post, has taken a real hit over the last two years. I have an urgent need to re-learn the ability to string together thoughts into a coherent argument.

I need to avoid the trap I always let myself fall into: fiddling with the platform, instead of using the platform to do the damn job.

To remove from myself the fatigue of choosing whatever this week’s hot static-site generator is, and to punish myself for taking years deciding what to use to write, instead of actually writing, I have returned to WordPress.

My punishment: to force myself to use a stable, mature, fully featured and easy to use platform that looks great. Such suffering.

Of course, I’m still going to fiddle: the site is running on an auto-recovering Amazon EC2 spot instance serving HTTP/2, blindingly fast with minimal compute resources, a containerised WordPress instance hosted behind strict SSL with a Qualys SSL Labs A-rating. I love that stuff, I’ll document it all for you sometime soon.

In the meantime, welcome back, and thanks for reading. See you soon!