About eighteen months ago, I decided to move my former blog off the WordPress platform. After several false starts with different technologies — Hugo and Pleroma in particular — I finally surrendered this week and installed a fresh self-hosted WordPress instance.
Technologically speaking, WordPress is kind of a dinosaur. The architecture of the open-source software package hasn’t changed substantially since I first started using it over fifteen years ago. It’s always been a pain to customize anything that a theme doesn’t offer to customize for you, and rolling your own theme, while not impossible, is quite a chore.
Admittedly, one of the things I underestimated when leaving WordPress was how hard it would be to find another blogging platform that so effortlessly allowed me to write posts from the road. If I primarily blogged from my desktop, I probably wouldn’t have come crawling back. However, I estimate somewhere around 80% of my posts over the years have been written from my smartphone.
I thought I could create my own software that would bridge the gap between my mobile device and my new blogging platform, but it proved to be far more challenging than I anticipated. The countless hours I spent trying to find a workable technical solution was time that could have better been spent blogging. For its part, WordPress has apps that provide decent mobile support and work pretty well out of the box.
Going forward, my plan is to try to customize my WordPress instance as little as possible, thereby embracing the software’s limitations rather than trying to fight them. I guess you could say that these are the terms of my surrender, although I feel like they’re words I’ve written once before.
With the technical issues behind me for now — I hope — I’m looking forward to writing again. Thanks to all of you who have encouraged me along this journey and have remained patient while I drew this full circle.