A Fresh Start

By Christopher Burg

Did you come to this site from my old blog? If so, welcome. If not, welcome all the same.

For the two of you who read my old blog, you noticed the almost complete lack of new content appearing in the last few years. Part of this is because after blogging regularly for 10 years, I got sick of creating new content constantly. I also decided to pull back from online discourse because things have become so divisive in the United States that it's damn near impossible to hold a civil conversation about anything but the weather (and even that can be controversial).

Why the return? I still like writing and a blog is a good excuse to do so. It also has the benefit of providing me the delusion that I have an audience. Why the new site? If you're not aware, the old blog is/was run on WordPress. I've long wanted to move away from WordPress for a number of reasons. The biggest of which is it's a nightmare to maintain. I self-host almost everything and maintaining a self-hosted WordPress site required maintaining the website the site runs on, which involved maintaining PHP and MariaDB, as well as the WordPress software. The WordPress developers have also implemented a number of interface changes that I don't like. Although most of them can be undone with add-ons, add-ons are also the single biggest security issue facing WordPress sites. I also don't need a lot of the features. For example, comments. See my remark about discourse above. If you want to comment on something I write, you can do it on your own website.

Static site generators are the hip thing and there are several strong technical reasons for that. The foremost being it's easy to host a static site. You don't need PHP or a database. The entire site can be committed to a git repository for easy version controlling. I also like that the writing tool is separate from the server. In 2023, WordPress moved to its new Gutenberg interface for writing articles and it's shit. I installed an add-on to disable it. With a static site, I use my preferred text editor to write articles with Markdown. It's easy and clean.

I'm writing this article in vim like a civilized person. The site you're reading was generated with Zola, which I chose because it's written in Rust and Rust is the single greatest programming language on Odin's blood soaked planet. Also, I found a theme I like called Duckquill. As dumb as it sounds, I spent a lot of time looking for a theme I liked. It has dark mode too so your eyes won't get blasted if you use that like I do.

What about the old site? I'm going to keep it running for a while longer mostly to create a post that gives everyone still subscribed to my RSS feed a heads up that the site is moving. For the reasons I mentioned above, I don't want to maintain that old WordPress site forever so I used the excellent wordpress-export-to-markdown application (and the also excellent Distrobox to isolate that NPM garbage in an easily destroyable container) to migrate all of my old WordPress articles to this site. They are available at the Archive. The archive is crude. None of the links for my old blog will work because the URL format changed from WordPress to this site. The old tags are also missing. They're embedded in the Markdown source code, but don't show on the site. There are probably a bunch of other issues with the archived articles due to the automated way I ported them. I have zero motivation to go through 10 years of articles and correct them so they are as-is. The search at the top should help you find an old article if, for some reason, you're looking for one.