spp > blog > are_we_really_doing_this_again

Hello again, World!

Remember waaaay back in 2018 when I converted this to a Wordpress site, and promised to start updating it much more often, and then that completely failed to happen? I blame Wordpress.

No, really, I do. I know people love it, but I was disheartened by the fact that the formatting standards I'd developed on my old site and on my Livejournal didn't work on Wordpress without installing extra plugins. It's an incredibly versatile platform, but the more customization you do, the less portable your data becomes. That's more or less true across the board with any software product, and it depresses me.

The main thing, though, is that I got discovered by The Bots who started hammering my blog entries with comments advertising everything from pornography to real estate. At first I was receiving maybe a dozen spam comments a day, but eventually that number increased to around 1,500. I'd always required approval before a comment was posted, and the idea of wading through all of those comments in the unlikely event that there was a real one was also depressing.

So, I let this website slide, again, for a long time. My second son was born, and I thought about blogging about it, but I didn't. Then COVID-19 happened, and I thought about blogging about it, but I didn't. There were quite a few moments over the last couple of years where I considered picking it back up, but those damn spam comments, waiting to be reviewed, were a major deterrent. I considered licensing an automatic moderation plugin to deal with the spam, but it hardly seemed worth it, given that my monthly visitor reports had shrunk considerably.

And then about a week ago I just decided to dive into the comments—all 600,000+ of them. That didn't last very long.

So how about a new approach? I completely deleted Wordpress—sorry—and went back to authoring my own site from scratch. Actually, I developed a pretty complicated Linux shell script to convert a bunch of text files into various page, blog posts, and an RSS feed. It's pretty exciting! Or it was, for the couple of days that I was actively working on it.

So what's next? Well, first, I'll probably have to bring my HTML skills kicking and screaming into the present, then re-write the shell script and... look, it's not important, the point is, I'm really pleased with this content management system I've developed for myself, and I'm looking forward to using this site a lot more (no, really).