---
layout: post
title: Farewell Wordpress
date: 2018-08-17
tags: ["Geek"]
---

The recent redesign of this blog ended up being a lot more than just a visual redesign. In many ways it has come full circle. In the earliest incarnation of May Contain Blueberries, I hand built HTML pages for each entry. As that became more annoying I switched over to [Movable Type](https://www.movabletype.com) in all its [Perl](https://www.perl.org) glory. But as I was doing my own development in PHP, I eventually transitioned to [Wordpress](https://wordpress.org) and while that has served me well (and the other users on my server), it was time to move on.

The biggest reason was maintenance driven by security. For a blog that I don't write on very often (sadly once a year seems about the norm), I was having to apply security patches at least monthly, if not more often. The benefits of a fully dynamic blog platform was its downfall. Wordpress is such a large piece of software it seems that no end of security issues are being discovered. And as a solo system administrator I need to minimize my attack surface as much as I can.

I took two paths. There were quite a few blogs that are no longer being used on my server, so I took static "snapshots" of them. While this did break inbound links, they weren't highly trafficed so I was ok with that (and search engines will figure it out).

For my blog, I decided to move to a static site generator. This has the benefits that I wanted such as templates, auto-generated index pages and such, but ends up serving plain HTML eliminating that security issue. I don't need onsite interactivity so why pay the costs for it. I chose [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com). It allows me to write posts in Markdown and automatically build the site and push it to my server in one step.

On to the new thing! Who knows, I might write more (probably not).