I migrated this blog from Gatsby to WordPress. I’m sure to many people that sounds insane. There’s so many tutorials online on how to migrate in the other direction, and even plugins that export all your content to Markdown files to stick into Gatsby, but nothing if you want to go another way.

I’m doing it mainly for ease of use. I’m old school, I’ve been using WordPress since 2003 at least. HTML and CSS are in my blood. You know what isn’t in my blood? JavaScript, React, dealing with NPM. Eventually I gave up trying to modify my Gatsby site because getting the dev environment to run locally became headache inducing.

WordPress, on the other hand, is very easy to reconfigure. I just update the CSS file! I started with BlankSlate, a set of template files with no styling applied. It was perfect for me. I didn’t want to have to learn what all the new template files and methodologies were. I just wanted something I could style and hack around, and this theme was perfect.

I also wanted to be able to easily write posts on my site, without having to load up a git client on my phone. Being able to load up the WordPress app on my phone and write this post on a whim at my kitchen table is a serious perk. It’s also much easier to add photos and videos to my posts, I can upload them right in the interface. WordPress gets a lot of flack from engineers, but you really can’t beat the ease of use.

(Not everything is perfect, the new posting interface can be a bit glitchy and annoying at times.)

In a similar vein, I wanted to be able to toss off small, microblog style posts without titles, kinda like media rich tweets. WordPress isn’t 100% built to be happy about posts without titles, but it works, and it was extremely easy to modify the styles so that micro posts have a Twitter-like post format, and long-form posts have a more traditional blog look.

It boggles the mind that I have been blogging in some form for 23+ years now. What is time? It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that I was an angsty freshman in high school, using Blogger. Now I’m an angsty adult, on the precipice of my 40’s, still using WordPress. The time, it flies! Either way, you should be able to expect me to write and share a wider variety of content on here now.

We’ll see!