Nanikore.net has been around for a while - 23 years in fact - and for the vast majority of that time it’s been running on top of WordPress.

That’s a long time - from it’s precocious start as an underdog open source blogging platform competing with Movable Type and Blogger, through to today where it’s a huge content management system running a high percentage of websites all the way up to corporate sites, running a massive number of themes and extensions. Phew!

It’s been a ride.

So why have I moved to a static site generator like Hugo? Top three reasons would be:

• I wanted an up to date copy on my local machine, since it’s kind of a diary for me. For some reason, not having a local copy started bothering me, and whilst I host wordpress on my own server, the database file isn’t really human readable for casual reading.
• It’s not because I dislike Wordpress or anything, it’s simply because I just don’t use or need or use a large amount of its features.
• Keeping plug-ins and themes up to date was sometimes an issue, as were backups, and that general maintenance for a low usage situation.

Why Hugo then?

• It’s a well supported and actively developed static site generator.
• Uses Markdown and that’s more compatible with other workflows.
• I currently maintain 2 other websites, and they’re both on Hugo, so that makes it simpler on my side.

What does this mean for you?

Hopefully, aside from the UI change, it shouldn’t mean much in the way of change. It should mean a few more posts as I had a bad habit of starting a post in Wordpress and then not logging in and forgetting about it.

It should be faster. I don’t think Wordpress was inherently slow for me, but there were times, and this should address those.

During this process, I’ve taken some time and resource to fix things too, like some (not all) broken links, some images etc., so things should be a little smoother too.

One larger change I couldn’t avoid was comments - I’ve moved to Giscus, meaning you need a Github account to post comments. Sorry about that. There are upsides, but if that’s a dealkiller, apologies in advance.

I’ll write up the process on brightblack, and link back here.