A fresh start

I’ve been running my website on WordPress since 2006, and before that is was all coded by hand. While WordPress is a quality platform and has a purpose, it no longer fits for what I want and need for my personal section of internet real estate.

Reviewing the last 18 months of posts on my old site made me realize that I haven’t actually written anything; they were all just cross posts from my Instagram account, and the times I have thought about writing something, I didn’t feel like logging into my site to write it up.

Earlier this summer I started planning to change my site. I was going to dump all the historical WordPress content to preserve it. Maybe I would copy some if it over to the new site, maybe I wouldn’t. I did not want to use a heavy content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal. I wanted a lightweight, easy to use platform. I wanted an easy way to post recipes, wood working projects, and also be able to write musings and other observations as they came to me.

I also wanted to be able to write in any text editor regardless of where I was. I am comfortable writing in markdown and wanted a platform that would allow me to use native markdown.

Another key factor was I did not want to have to manage a web server, deal with hosting, worry about security issues, and have to constantly stay on the offensive to ensure my site wasn’t hacked or compromised by bots. I do this stuff for a living, and don’t want to have to deal with it when I get home as well.

So the path forward was clear… I was going to find a new platform, start fresh, and keep it simple. The solution was Hugo, forget about the past 13 years of random stuff I had posted and focus on what’s important in my life right now. I will likely add a few more areas of interest on this site, but for now we will start with this post and maybe a recipe or two.

Everyone needs to eat.