WordPress, one month later.

It might be too soon, but I wanted to make this post anyway because it’s been on the mind lately.

Last month or so, I decided after hopping on and wrangling with static site generators to dismiss them as a whole, and I decided to make the jump to WordPress. And frankly, I don’t regret it… mostly. I do want to polish the site a little bit more, but being able to customise my site without having to wrangle with JavaScript just to have an image figure is honestly a massive fucking relief that I am happy to pay for WordPress hosting. You could probably tell from the frequent posts but I’m having way more fun with WordPress than I ever did with a static site generator. I did try messing with those again, and I just find them too cumbersome. Hugo seems to be the simplest for me, but it’s still very cumbersome to do web developer things when all I want to do is write. Publii is ever so close, but doesn’t have grammar-checking and the themes leave a lot more to be desired.

Gutenberg has been doing the job pretty well. It’s not as zen as Obsidian, Ghost’s post editor, or something like iA Writer, but it does the job and is very convenient anyways, so it loops back round. It’s got basic Markdown support which is good enough for me. Being able to type / and choose whatever block I wanted is nice. I do know that WordPress.com is beta-testing a block-based editor optimised solely for writing, so hopefully that trickles down to .org (though for me that might not be a problem).

Harper is… simply okay. I need to try other grammar checkers like LanguageTool, but it has helped with very basic things but keeps tripping up on certain words which is more annoying than I’d like. I would like to not rely on an AI chatbot reading my prose for this, so I may go looking towards LanguageTool.

The one thing that I do regret however, is going straight for self-hosting. Right now, I’m hosting the site on DreamHost, and it basically means I have to handle a lot more maintenance of the site than I’d like. It’s also going to be way more expensive when my first year’s up. It’s been highly discouraged to use WordPress.com, the managed WordPress host run by Automattic, however it’s mostly for ideological reasons nowadays. Sure, Matt Mullenweg’s behaviour is a genuine concern, but at the same time I’m not sure if it’s even worth it for me to be hosting this on DreamHost. All of my plugins are available on WordPress.com barring Super Cache (which isn’t needed on WP.com), and the site will happily manage all the harder stuff for me, even down to including a CDN. Furthermore, concerns over generative AI scraping are moot for me because I post on Bluesky and the Fediverse, neither of which are fool-proof when it comes to AI scraping. If that is a concern then do find another WordPress host. For me, WordPress.com would probably do the job for me while being much cheaper, and given my financial situation it’s probably for the better. I’m going to ride DreamHost out until next year, tho.