Goodbye Wordpress!

For the last five years this site has been generated by Wordpress. The decision to move to Wordpress was based primarily on the ammount of spam that was being posted through the comment system I had written. Wordpress provides some great tools for fighting comment spam. But comments on weblog posts are becoming more irrelvant by the day; or rather, no one does it anymore. So I don’t have need of that feature any longer.

But that’s not why I have dumped Wordpress. I have dumped Wordpress because it is one giant security hole:

• http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/more-than-1-million-wordpress-websites-imperiled-by-critical-plugin-bug/
• http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/just-released-wordpress-0day-makes-it-easy-to-hijack-millions-of-websites/
• http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/as-many-as-1-million-sites-imperiled-by-dangerous-bug-in-wordpress-plugin/
• http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/swarm-of-wordpress-plugins-susceptible-to-potentially-dangerous-exploits/
• http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/05/actively-exploited-wordpress-bug-puts-millions-of-sites-at-risk/

I could keep linking stories of its vulnerabilities all day. Suffice it to say, it is foolish to continue using Wordpress.

Given that fact, I decided to forego a dynamically generated website altogether. This site is now completely static. This site is written in nothing more than plain old HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That used to come at a cost of maintainability. It was far easier to use a dynamic content generator for a site of any size if you wanted to be able to maintain it. Nowadays that isn’t the case. There are many, many, tools for generating static websites. I even wrote one at one point (you probably shouldn’t use it).

The tool I settled on using is Metalsmith. It’s a very simple tool with a lot of flexibility. I won’t go over it in detail here. You can read about in detail elsewhere. If you are curious about the code to generate this site, you can peruse the git repository. At the time of this writing the project is just enough to get going.

If you’re using Wordpress, and want to migrate off it, then I have written a tool you might want to use – wp-to-static. I had been wanting to do this migration since early 2015, but it took me a while to finish writing that tool (mostly due to laziness). I’m a firm believer in the 301 code. As a result, all of my old content is still available; even my old old content.

Anyway, I have been holding off writing new posts because I didn’t want to add any more content to Wordpress. Now that I’ve moved on to this setup I will maybe write more frequently. My current goal, though, is to come up with some sort of better template/design.

Finally, I may consider adding Disqus comment system. But it’s unlikely. If you have something to say about a post, you can mention @jsumners79 on Twitter or +JamesSumners on Google+.