🍾 Mission Boycott WordPress: Finally complete

I am laughing my ass off. I don’t think I have been this excited to write a blog post in a really long time, and for reasons that are entirely to do with the technical setup of my blog, and not the writing itself. I mentioned over the course of the past year that I was going to migrate my blog from WordPress to Astro, and set myself the goal of completing it by the end of 2025. I had a whole project in my Things app, I put dedicated time in my calendar, I told my friends and wrote about my intentions online for accountability—my usual executive function hacks, but still didn’t meet my own deadline.

But it doesn’t really matter, because I got it done in the end. 🥹 Only about half a year too late! If I dig through some of my git commits, it seems like I really only started to get cracking mid way through last year, and I even said the project was on pause. I was going through quite a lot in 2025, and experiencing life draining mental energy.

✍🏻 My decision to move from WordPress

I moved from WordPress for a couple of reasons. It became tedious to write my posts in the WYSIWYG and I wanted things to be simpler. Understanding what executive function is helped me understand how to make tasks I wanted to do even simpler, especially something that comes as naturally to me as writing does. The WYSIWYG looked nice, sure, but a pretty interface doesn’t always “help” with getting the job done.

I was often using my code editor to write posts and to caption the many images I put in my posts, especially those related to travel. The custom shortcode I created for using the figure element with my images was nicer to look at in my editor.

I had long been thinking about static site generators and the potential for faster loading of my website, and not needing to depend on a database. There was nothing inherently “wrong” with WordPress and I would still recommend it for other purposes, but it felt like my blog and I were “ageing out of it”, for want of a better phrase. The thing that blocked me from ever moving to a SSG was continuing to hang onto the comments section, and keeping the comments displayed on my oldest blog posts. Keeping comments meant keeping a database, unless I wanted to use a third-party service that would require me to add extensions or external scripts, and those services may potentially “own” my comments. That didn’t sit right with me. My friend Geoff had joked with me for many years about my predicament, and even tried to think of a solution where I could stop using WordPress but still have comments. There was no solution at the time, and I haven’t checked if there is one now.

In the end, I decided to do away with the comments. I said in my Hey 2025! post that I accept that we’re in an era where people rarely comment on blog posts. I still received them, but more often, I got emails or direct messages on social media. These were incredibly wholesome interactions. I also guess you could say I was going with the crowd, when I noticed that not many people had comment sections on their blogs anymore.

The other strange thing was having these comments on my older blog posts which felt important because there were so many of them, but in reality the way my old friends/connections and I would communicate with each other was through our blog comments. We would “return comments” on each other’s latest blog post, so dozens of comments on my blog posts would be conversation pieces unrelated to the post’s content, with missing context because the rest of the conversation was on someone else’s blog. Any visitor could read the comments but not be able to understand or follow the conversation. It could be novel; it could be quirky—but it’s ultimately kind of odd. And I felt like I didn’t need that content hanging around on my old posts anymore.

💬 A moment to talk about “comment sections” on the web

Comment sections on the web have become something else, sadly, especially with the popularity of social media and the rise of internet trolls and bullies. The comment section is now treacherous territory that users even feel a need to call out when the comment sections are “wholesome” or the comments “pass the vibe check”. Internet culture will always be fascinating to me (hey, I wanted to do a PhD in social media and identity, back in the day, when social media was still new and shit), but since I accepted the fact that my blog will always change and grow with me, the comments on my blog became a part of that change. I accept that it is no longer serving the purpose it used to serve.

Financial admin is becoming easier. MTD for income tax

🛑 Roadblocks and why it took so long

I’d love to get a bit more into the technical details, but not in this post. Definitely in the next one. For now I want to relish in the fact that I’m writing my first blog post in Markdown and my blog is running on Astro. But apart from just going through a rough time in my life, the two biggest hurdles with the migration were:

1. porting my theme over to Astro
2. converting the more custom parts of my WordPress export to be compatible with Astro

I simply underestimated how much time it would take to move my theme to Astro. I had chosen Astro purely based on familiarity with it through my job. I knew roughly how things worked, and I thought it was a good start compared to learning something from scratch. However, there was a lot I didn’t know. I thought I could do a pretty simple copy-and-paste, but once again, converting all the details and things I cared about took time. This included stuff like metadata/schemas that relied on WordPress plugins or PHP I wrote myself.

🐛 Still some bugs to iron out

I chose to deploy a half-baked blog, as long as the majority of the newest posts are working and the pictures are loading, and some of the pages can be viewed. I did this on purpose so I could motivate myself to fix and complete everything in the open, and avoid being perfectionistic about the final product. It was most important to me that I get the metadata correct and my about me and Best of HG pages updated, and that my RSS feed would still work with the same permalinks. 🥲 And both those things were done.

There are some bugs I am aware of and some improvements I want to make:

• There is a poetry page, and it is a hot mess. It has my old poetry, and I have been attending poetry nights recently and reciting some new pieces, which I would love to add to my blog
• There are no category pages at the moment
• No custom 404 page
• No search functionality
• My CSS file is awful 🙈
• I should probably improve caching

That’s all for today. Thank you for supporting me. I found this post a joy to write; it felt speedy and like I could focus on my words. I am so keen to share more about the process and the things I learned.