A decision is made

I’ve been wrangling with this for months. Back and forth. It is entirely trivial in the scheme of things, no matter which perspective you apply. Except my own, that is.

This website is my space on the web.

My tiny little corner of the internet.

An online home.

For nearly twenty years it’s been powered by Wordpress. As I’ve spent much of the past year reflecting on my relationship with technology, that fact has left an increasingly sour taste in my mouth.

There’s too much of it I don’t comprehend. Too many dependencies I don’t understand or am aware of, let alone control.

The recent debacle initiated by the Wordpress founder all but sealed the deal. These events have made it abundantly clear that Wordpress is, for all practical purposes, its founder. There’s but a thin veil separating the various entities that add up to what’s known as “Wordpress” and all of them are effectively controlled by one person.

I don’t want to live in a digital house controlled by a would-be internet despot.

I’ve thought about my options. I could sever the ties to Wordpress. Stop my instance from phoning home, opt out of future updates and maintain it on my own. But it’s a bad idea. There’s too much complexity here, technical solutions and interdependencies I have neither the ability nor interest of staying on top of.

Another option is to hitch my wagon to another horse. To learn another CMS and have it be the engine of my online home. I know there are great options out there. But it means sacrificing an element of control. My recent reflections on technology have taught me that this is something I value.

For that reason, I've decided to go with the option of creating a static website. Just like I did a quarter century ago. Most of what I did back then will work just fine today, too. Which is the ultimate testament to the longevity of this approach. What's more, instead of picking one of the many static site generators available out there, I will build my own.

Or, rather, I will construct a solution tailored to my own needs and based on my own knowledge. That's to say, the "generator" part will be one or several super simple scripts that combine content in the form of markdown files with templates in the form of HTML and CSS files to create static HTML files in a file structure that I can easily dump on a web server. No framework or dev tools to master. Just content, handwritten HTML and CSS and a script to automate the tedious cut and paste-work.

How long will this take?

I don't know. All I know is that it is necessary. Because lately I've felt that I've lost ownership of my online home. I need to act, lest I abandon it and find myself drifting aimlessly around cyberspace once more, as I did before resurrecting this website last year.