Away from Wordpress
I’ve been searching for a hassle free, full control, solution for this blog for years. I’ve made the jump from Wordpress to Tumblr, back to Wordpress and I know there was another in there I’m forgetting. That’s all after the static versions prior, back when you needed your own webserver or shared hosting account to deliver it.
I originally moved to Wordpress because of the flexibility and simplicity of getting up and running. The benefits are all pretty clear. However, the thing that always irked me was the hosting requirement. Having run a hosting company previously, and wanting to have the ability to fix issues as they arise, should that become necessary, I couldn’t bring myself to use shared hosting, despite doing it at one point. Because of that, I was left with no other option than to maintain my own server, a VPS, EC2 instance to be exact. I’ve been doing that for at least a few years now. It’s been mostly hassle free, but just having it and knowing I’m going to have to deal with it sometimes is enough of an annoyance.
That’s why I’ve made the leap away from Wordpress and to a static site. I’m using Hexo, a Node.js driven static site generator. I’m still learning some things, but overall it’s been pretty good, flexible enough and simple enough. I wanted something written in Javascript for a number of reasons that I won’t get into here, but Hexo seems to fit the bill quite well.
And that’s about enough for this first post. I still have to migrate over all my old content and reason with the site design a bit more. Hopefully I can find the time to do all this soon. :)