Not just the voices in my head, but also the heated discussions in the blogosphere around comments compelled me to take my hand-coded website and rebuild it with WordPress.org. There were a few reasons that made me make the jump.
Now that it’s set up, all I have to do is log into my blog, type my post in the block editor, and press publish. WordPress handles all the backend of saving files and creating links. Before, I was having to open a minimum of 3 HTML pages and carefully update each one, repeating much of the same information multiple times.
The feed is handled for me now. I literally don’t have to do anything for the feed to function. It works for only following specific categories and tags too. All I have to do is make the links available, which I plan to do at some point. The links are all consistent, so I don’t have to worry about figuring out how to make them.
Comments are extremely simple. At first, all I had to do was click a button that opened comments per post. After a while of doing this, I looked in the settings and found an option for making them available automatically for new posts.
This site is future-proof now. I don’t have to worry about whether a feature will be compatible later down the road or worry about building any new features myself. Though I will have to figure out how to implement any new features.
I ended up using the Astra theme, because it comes with a few extra features that make some things simpler. The free version is plenty for me. There were some things I had to do through additional CSS, and I won’t lie, that was a pain because it took a lot of guesswork to figure out what classes to use. To be fair to WordPress, I probably could have done most of it in settings, but you know, old habits and such.
There are a ton of free plugins that let you do stuff on WordPress without the need for dealing with code. For now, I’ve opted out of using plugins. They are convenient, but they have to be updated often, and some could be poorly written, causing security threats. Plus, many track visitor data, and I don’t like that at all.
It’s just like me to spend so much time perfecting the hand-coded version only to jump to a completely different build. I was able to copy and paste all the content of my posts, so that’s something. All the links had to be redirected in .htaccess. The original feed was updated there too, so no one will have to subscribe to the new feed. Luckily, my home page was a list of links to all my posts. ChatGPT was able to make all the redirects a simple copy and paste for me.
I’m glad to have taken the time to build the old version. I learned a lot, and in the spirit of Cool Hand Luke, it was something to do.