Bye, Wordpress!
By Mick Morrison
It’s been a while between updates here, but today we’re back online. The site has languished for a few years, and I’ve never been very happy with the look and feel of it. I’ve been using Wordpress.org for many years, and it has been a great platform. Back in the late 2000s it was quite a novel product, and after starting on ‘Blogger’ a few years earlier I quickly migrated to WP, as I found it was a refreshingly easy to use, yet highly customisable platform for web publishing.
My dissatisfaction stems from the simple fact that it takes time and skill to develop and manage a nice-looking Wordpress blog. This, along with their recent switch to a new Editor interface, and the persistent need to update and manage the CMS, were key to my recent decision to transfer to Hugo. This took some time, mostly to learn how to use a static site generator, but they are very straightforward with excellent documentation.
In practice, this means the site will become a static one with a simple file structure and no backend database to break. I write posts in RStudio, in Markdown, then generate the site with a few quick commands (Hugo and Hugo server) and sync the generated site to my webserver with FTP. I use RStudio for my research daily, so it made good sense to integrate my blog here as I hope it will encourage me to more frequently post here!