So, with all the argy-bargy in the news about WordPress and the guy in charge of it and the ecosystem being affected by that guy’s shenanigans… why stay on WordPress? Why not, for instance, jump on the bandwagon of the last few years and change over to a static site generator (or SSG)? This site could load much faster, and with vastly less server processing overhead! No more SQL database, no more finicky plugin shenanigans… easy peasy, right?

I spent most of my morning today reading up on doing exactly this, and while it might still work for the webcomic (provided I never update it again… which is admittedly all-too-likely) it won’t work here, and it took hours of reading before I finally found someone who pointed out why:

When you update the site, you have to regenerate every page on the site. Every time. A lot of these guys (and it’s all guys, yes) have maybe a couple dozen posts, tops. Regenerating the flat files from Markdown sources could take them maybe a minute or so! Who cares, right?

The current count of entries listed as “posts” on the website you’re reading right now is well over 2,500. And that’s not counting “pages” and other such additions.

Yeah, nope. I can’t take that seriously. I want to be posting here more often, not less. And if I find myself dreading the rebuild time every time I want to publish, that’s not going to help. (Never mind if something about one of those several thousand posts breaks the generator!) So if I migrate off of Dubya Pee it’ll have to be to something more… CMS-y.

Such is the way of things, I suppose.

Things look a bit odd over here, don’t they? No two-column layout, no randomized header image (yet, maybe).

Here’s the thing: Hemingway was a very good website theme, I liked most everything about it, but it’s long in the tooth and was eventually going to become fully obsolete. The inevitable march of technology, or something. So upon the advice of professional website designers, I’m… using the new Twenty Twenty Five default WordPress theme.

(And yes, using WordPress is a fraught choice in and of itself nowadays, for certain reasons we’re not going into at the moment. At least I’m self-hosted.)

I have a lot of fiddling and fussing to do, so expect things to look a bit odd for a while. Or, like, forever, depending.

Wish me luck making sense of this bold new scheme.

Just a quick heads-up for other WordPress admin types who installed the Duo plugin years ago and kind of forgot about it… apparently it’s been deprecated in favor of a new plugin which supports the new “universal prompt” system. It’s not hard to upgrade (deactivate old, install new, activate new, enter the same token/passkey/hostname as you did before into new, authenticate, delete the old once you’ve confirmed new works) but I wish there’d been a bit more communication about this.

Also be aware that Universal Prompt defaults to an immediate push notification rather than giving you a button to click to initiate a push. Other than that, it’s basically the same, and works just fine. Hooray for security.