(This is primarily a test post to see if my hacky ActivityPub sidecar works, but it also doubles as ‘splainer for the changes.)
Any longtime reader will notice a pretty major change to the blog. Since 2011, the rud.is/b posts have been served through WordPress. Part of the reason was that I had been helping a few non-profits keep their WP sites safe, and felt that the only way to know their pain was to run one. Back then, the self-hosted WP experience also wasn’t horrible from a usability standpoint. The orgs I had been helping either retired or moved on from WP, and in recent years, WP has become quite bloated. There’s also the reality that to have a WordPress installation survive on the internet, you need — at a minimum — Akismet (anti-spam) and Wordfence (a built-in “firewall” plugin). Both are not free, so it there was a real, annual cost to serving up the pages. Lastly, Mullenweg (the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic) is also a real tool of a human being, and I’m tired of supporting folks like him.
So, we’re now an Astro site. It was a bit of a slog to get the content into a form that was usable in an Astro static site builder context. For starters, the earlier posts were in lovingly hand-crafted (read: “awful”) HTML. At some point, I inserted a plugin into the mix that enabled me to use Markdown for posts. Along the way, I also used three separate plugins for syntax highlighting of code blocks, and a few more plugins for twitter, youtube, and other embeds. I ended up building six one-off parsers (thankfully the permutations over those years only resulted in six distinct combos) to handle 96% of the cases. That means some posts are going to look terrible, but the web logs show that the back catalog doesn’t get many 👀. If you find any of them and really want me to tackle them, hit me up on Mastodon.
I had planned this move a few years ago, but at that time, WordPress decided to play nice with the Fediverse and introduced (a pretty well done) ActivityPub. It was so easy to federate the blog that I gave in to laziness and pressed the button.
With the conversion work done, and the ActivityPub sidecar written, I made the call to do the cutover this past Friday. The only thing left on the cutting-room floor is the email feature of WordPress which shipped the posts to subscriber’s inboxes. If you were one of the non-spam account subscribers and really want that feature, let me know and I’ll work out something.
The new setup should result in reviving the OG blog as a counterpart to the newsletter, and AI blog, with more frequent posts.
Depending on how this new “first post” goes fediverse-wise, there may be a couple more short posts until any kinks are worked out.
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