Farewell WordPress, bonjour Hugo

Marcin Zajączkowski — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Get know about my migration from WordPress to Hugo and the reasons behind it.

Welcome to my new blog!

This is a modified version of the blog post I also placed as the last one on my old WordPress-based blog.

I started my technical blog at the end of 2010. The primary reason was a need to find a place to write about my tools , my ideas and spotted problems (or course with solutions to make life easier for others :-) ). I didn’t plan to write a lot and I accomplished that. By that 9+ years I published 61 posts - just ~6,5 per year, gaining popularity year by year.

The trends were changing over time. The number one for long time was posted in 2011 guide about improving the TestNG reporting with ReportNG . Next it was Gradle and displaying dependencies in a multi-project build, followed by more compact Mockito with Java 8 and using Mockito with JUnit 5 . I am also happy that people are looking for basic, but crutial topics such as importance of given-when-then in unit tests.

Coming back to the editorial things, initially, I chose WordPress as I was a popular FOSS solution with an ability to (optionally) make it self-hosted (as opposed to Blogger). It was possible to easily setup everything and to have a fully-fledged blog quickly. Thank you Automattic for that!

My blog has been always a side project to express myself and help others. As that, I would prefer to do not pay monthly subscription fee. In the free version wordpress.com has a few limitations. First of all, you cannot use your own domain. As a result even having redirects from your domain, most of the external sites link to wordpress.com and you do not fully control the content. Secondly, you are limited to the predefined themes and a level of its customization (e.g. CSS styles) is quite restricted. Thirdly, ads. Despite a clear “Occasionally, some of your visitors may see an advertisement here,” banner displayed to me, long time I wasn’t aware how it looks in practice (my hardened browser configuration limits it greatly). My visitors seeing that (different, possible targeted) ads on my blog could consider me as its source, which I didn’t like.

As hosting WordPress on my VPS could be challenging (I don’t know PHP, nor WP itself) and risky (it needs to be updated regularly due to detected security threats), I decided to go into static site generators (namely Hugo). Having initial configuration behind (which can take some time…, even with so nice and future rich theme as Zzo ) it promises to be easy to maintain. In addition, it can be much easily hosted. Here, I chose Netlify which, in addition to a lot of interesting features, also provides great integration with the Git-based deployment workflow (blog as code). All at the cost of much harder integration with dynamic features (such as comments). There is a chance that I will write something some it in the future.

I have some ideas for (hopefully) interesting topics to cover. Feel free to visit my blog from time to time (or even better subscribe for updates :-) ).

P.S. As I don’t have an access to the list of the original subscribers at WordPress, if you are in that group please subscribe again to the new feed or the new email notifications here to get know what is going :-).

Where are all the old posts?

Marcin Zajączkowski — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Find out where to find all the old posts I wrote in the previous years.

Over the previous (almost) 10 years I wrote dozens of blog posts. When I started to plan the switch to an another blog platform, I was initially considering its migration. Wordpress allows you to export your content (thanks!). There are also various tools for conversion to markdown. Nevertheless, some of the post are already quite popular (nicely positioned in the WordPress.com domain) and probably useful for people and I don’t want to break it.

There is a chance to mirror them one day using the canonical meta-tag, but for now please visit the my old blog site for that content: https://solidsoft.wordpress.com/

Updated 2020-03-05. I migrated a few old posts to fill the empty space on the post list in the first weeks of the new blog :-).

blog on Solid Soft

Farewell WordPress, bonjour Hugo

Welcome to my new blog!

Where are all the old posts?