I’ve very long been in a love/hate relationship with WordPress from the get-go, even for this site. As the years have gone on I’ve had less and less reason to use WP. I’ll enumerate some reasons:

1. It’s gotten bigger and fatter
   1. Takes nearly half a second to render a page
   2. So much going on you can’t figure it out
2. The new block editing system feels half baked
3. I’m nowhere near as active at posting here, and as a consequence, there’s far less interaction
4. The theme I used for a LONG time (LeoPress) is no longer maintained
   1. I can’t find a single theme I can stomach.
   2. The default theme is a gross nightmare
   3. All I want is a sidebar, search, and content! Why the full screen banner starts?! Shouldn’t have to scroll to read content
5. I already disabled new signups, and had to pull in reCaptcha as well due to bots, despite Cloudflare’s best efforts.

Those reasons and more mean that it’s perfectly fine that this gets converted to a static site. I decided on converting to Hugo after I found a very minimal theme TeXify that meets my needs, a quick shovel-in (I can’t call it a plugin) for lightboxing images (I’ve got more cleanup to do there!) and a conversion flow that got at least the content in.

I still have to clean up a number of things.

All the comments will be lost, the conversion process(es) I found don’t seem to carry those over. XML/RSS feeds are available, but I’ve got to figure out if those are working.

The links up aboge for Categories and Tags aren’t working correctly. Probably something between me and the theme not generating the index listing.

Permalinks SHOULD all more-or-less still work, at least the ones to articles.

No search right now. I’ll probably figure out how to make a Google search box link.

Posts images often reference /wp-content/uploads/ and aren’t lightboxing because they’re not converted in a compatible way. Some old posts with <pre> tags are UTTERLY mangled. There may still be some embedded links that while the end result works, they’re actually embedded links instead of being proper Hugo relref.

As I go around fixing the above up, the old /wp-content/uploads/ files will disappear, and the published images will be webp (smaller faster, not much quality loss, widely supported…)

The font comes up a bit small. Might get fixed by the time this “draft state” site is pushed up. GOT THAT FIXED!

I’m sure there’s probably more bits that are a bit broken at the moment. I’ll work through them as I have time!

For me it means creating/editing content is wildly different. I can’t just quickly fire up on my phone anymore, well, I could, but probably won’t. And that’s not something I’d done previously anyway. Everything is GFM, along with some extensions.