tl;dr

Bye bye WordPress, hello Eleventy!

After wanting to do it for awhile, I finally spent last weekend migrating this blog from WordPress to Eleventy.

Why? Many reasons.

A big one is that before 2015, WordPress was something I mostly did as a hobby, as part of being in fandom, with the occasional freelance gig outside my actual job. Since 2015, WordPress is my job. Which means I have very little desire to spend time on anything WordPress when I'm not working. It doesn't help that more and more WordPress feels bloated and overengineered.

I'm not going to say that's the only reason it's gotten harder and harder to post on here. Partly it's also that shortform social media turns brains into mush when one sits and attempts to write a long form post. Part is of course less and less fandom people look outside whatever social media environment they're in. Part is simply having less free time.

But I do think that the reason I stated above is part of it. Meanwhile, these days my fansites all run on Eleventy, and it feels a lot like it did, oh, 20 years ago, when Making Websites was as much a normal and appreciated fandom activity as Writing Fanfic. So hopefully, this helps.

Anyway, not everything works. The Twitter Threads category is hopelessly broken. These threads where largely screenshots with short texts, and since I deleted all my tweets... the images are broken. I do have my twitter archive, but I don't know if it's worth hunting through it to fix. Maybe I'll delete most of those.

Another thing that is broken is wherever WordPress shortcodes were used (galleries, embeds from YouTube or Vimeo). That I will fix, when I get the chance.

The big next step, however, is making writing posts pleasurable and being able to do it from my phone or iPad as well as my computer. To that end I am writing this post on Obsidian, and the plan is to integrate Obsidian into Eleventy by using a symlink to the iCloud folder where the Obsidian vault is that did not work. Git submodules, it is... A script that syncs a folder in my Obsidian vault to my Eleventy folder, and THEN I commit.

So basically: I can write on any device, but when I want to publish, I have to sync and commit from the computer. That's fine.

If you're reading this, it means it worked!