January 9, 2019

Moving Back to WordPress

<p>It's been some time since this blog ran on WordPress. I can't remember when exactly, but some time ago I moved this blog to Medium for the convenience of not having to manage a site and the free exposure offered by Medium's network. However, these days hosting your own content is in vogue again and I don't blame people when you look at the state of Medium now.</p> <p>Early last year I <a href="https://gilbitron.me/blog/moving-away-from-medium/">moved away from Medium</a> to a self-built, flat-file CMS called <a href="https://circulatecms.com/">Circulate</a>. Sadly I've not had the time or motivation to build out Circulate and this blog has been pretty stale since. However, over the holiday period I decided it was time to get this thing back on WordPress.</p> <h2>Why WordPress?</h2> <p>There are two reasons why I decided to move this blog back to WordPress.</p> <p>The first is that we've just opened up <a href="https://spinupwp.com/">SpinupWP</a> for beta over at <a href="https://deliciousbrains.com/">Delicious Brains</a> (still in beta). SpinupWP is a modern server control panel that allows you to spin up a secure server tuned for WordPress in minutes. I've been working on SpinupWP since early last year and I figured running my own site on SpinupWP would be a great way to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food">dogfood</a> the product. As a side note, when I say &quot;tuned for WordPress&quot; I mean &quot;blazing fast&quot;! Here is the Lighthouse audit results for this site:</p> <p><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/9b1r03jrrwqy/3bvWqr9gDahvPhqPIukBb0/346ac4b323e101be11a255820bbad8bf/Screenshot-2019-01-09-at-2.59.58-pm-1024x174.png" alt="" /></p> <p>The second reason is that it's actually quite an exciting time for WordPress right now. Despite the, sometimes justified, &quot;backlash against something new&quot; reaction from the WordPress community, the <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/bebo/">release of WordPress 5.0</a> with the Gutenberg editor is a pretty major culture shift in the WordPress world and something which I hope will be a good thing in the long run. WordPress has a long history of backwards-compatibility and technical debt and, in my opinion, has needed a big culture shift to come from the top for some time. I understand the reluctance many developers have to embrace such a fundamental change but I'm hoping this will turn out to be the start of a bright new future for WordPress as it catches up with the rest of the web community in 2019.</p> <p>So here I am, back on WordPress. Hopefully this will mean I'll actually write some more blog posts in 2019. We'll see.</p>