metaruss

A few weeks ago, I started looking into what it would take to convert this WordPress-based site back into a static site using a static site generator. My main motivation was to end the update treadmill, constant security threats, and the fire hose of comment spam unless I also pay for Akismet. I post to my site in bursts and it can go years without any updates. This does not mesh well with WordPress. Although it can auto-update itself, the plugins need constant attention. I’ve had two security incidents, one where I had to restore from backups. Then there is the inevitable bit-rot that happens with abandoned plugins and my customized theme as major WordPress versions are released. The site is in need of a re-theme, but I’d rather do it once and be done.

I looked at a few options (Jekyll, Hugo, Astro) and settled on Eleventy. I liked its light weight, short list of dependencies, and the ability to control everything. I used wordpress-export-to-markdown to import the content from an export XML. It did some weird stuff to the front matter and downloaded images were scattered around, but the content was all there. I wrote some scripts to perform bulk reorganization of the markdown and image files and set out to create layout templates to reconstruct the basic functionality that WordPress provided. I dusted-off my old CSS theme from the original static site to use as a starting point. I’ll get more playful with the look later. Overall, the initial import process was not that difficult.

I did still have to manually scrub every page and post to address formatting issues (floating images, image blocks, small galleries, etc) and broken internal links that were still pointing to things from the old static site. I also found that some old content went missing at some point, so I tried to recover what I could from backups. I employed Claude to help with some of that, once I established a pattern. There were also hacks in the page content to work around WordPress limitations that I could now take care of directly in Eleventy (categories, subcategories, topics, etc). 11ty has proven to be a good fit for my needs, once I got my head around things like the data cascade and pagination. It’s pretty intuitive, once you “get” it.

WordPress was never the best CMS solution for my site. I shoe-horned my old static site into it by slightly-abusing the page hierarchy and category systems. It worked, but it was brittle. I chose it mainly because the project appeared to have “staying power” (which is has) and I was able to bend it to my needs with a custom theme. I had hoped the built-in editor would reduce friction and induce more frequent updates from myself. It probably did, but not to the extent I was expecting. Markdown much easier publish with than raw HTML, so it’s still a step up from a pure, static website.

I would also like be more “surfable” on the olde Internet. There are some signs of other creators wanting to break out of big tech’s walled gardens and just make websites again. What better way than with some old-skool HTML and CSS. Webrings are a thing again and Neocities somehow exists.