When I logged into my WordPress dashboard yesterday to write my latest post I was prompted to upgrade my site to version 7.0. “No problem,” I said. I always update when a never version is available because I like bells and whistles and am able to adapt to new paradigms, even at my age. Of course, v7.0 comes bearing air-quotes gifts air-quotes of AI integration because what product is valuable these days without AI integration, right? RIGHT!?

WordPress has, for many, many years now, been chasing e-commerce. I long for the days before commercialism grabbed the Internet by the throat and chained it to the financial sector but there’s no use crying over spilled bytes, I suppose. While the core of WordPress still functions exceedingly well for what I and others like me do — basic blogging — simply putting words on pages is no longer the platform’s main focus. They chased the commercial aspects of building a website, since companies needed websites in the mid- to late-90’s, and now it’s joining into the rabid pack of tech bros in chasing AI for whatever corner it can shoe-horn it into just because everyone else is doing it.

I am mainly ambivalent about AI right now, but I’ve got limits and I think this might be one of them. I’ve seen other software issue updates, like Visual Studio Code, for example, and every release notes page has gone from a list of cool features I might actually use to nothing but AI features I never asked for or ever wanted. I suspect that WordPress’ future updates are going to focus less on announcing widely useful features, and more about how awesome their AI integrations are. I’m sure there are marketing departments and C-suiters out there who are excites about this for the WordPress sites they operate, but me? Not so much.

I was looking through my web host’s support site this morning and found that they offer a small-site package for $0. This package and tier support hosting deployments from GitHub. That got me thinking about giving it a go, but I have some speedbumps I need to investigate first.

I’ve never used GitHub as an actual deployment platform. For me, It’s always been strictly a backup and never anything more. I know it can do more but I’ve not looked into anything beyond the push and pull and clone, so I’ll need to do that.

What to use, though? I’ve been going around this block for over 30 years now and I’m tired, chat. Really tired of doing development. I don’t want to build something. I want something else off the shelf, and the simpler the better. My host’s $0 tier mentioned that they can host Astro sites, and I am familiar with the name and the concepts if not the absolute operation of the platform. I don’t want to scaffold a site, and I don’t want to start from scratch, so I looked into their template system and found that, like WordPress, there are many to choose from starting at free and moving up into for-sale. I’m OK with for-sale if I like the theme; this one that you’re looking at now was purchased many years ago and I never had any ragerts about it. From what I gather, I can download a template, issue the appropriate commands to install dependencies, add content — by hand, now, since Astro uses Markdown — and upload the changes to GitHub. Then, using GitHub Actions or whatever it’s called, build the site and auto-deploy it to the host. Bam. Done. In theory.

The upside is that I’m free of whatever enshittification that WordPress is gleefully barreling towards. I say that from a place of annoyance, not spite, not right now. I’ve been considering this move for a while, although it originally started by wanting a more straightforward theme than the one I’m using because while I like it, it doesn’t really fit the vibe of “old man yelling at cloud infrastructure” I work hard to curate here. A simple single-page list of posts with a dedicated post URL display is kind of what I’m looking for, and I can get that with Astro, or even make or modify an existing theme, because it’s not 30 years of PHP cruft like WordPress is.

The downside is that it’s work. Ugh. I have to get the Astro site working locally, train myself to perform whatever needs to happen to get my posts integrated with the site, set up GitHub and all of it’s bells and whistles (I do love bells and whistles), sign up for that free host account, then manage the pipeline between repo and host. Truth be told, I like WordPress’ visual editor, and would miss that, though I’ve become quite adept at Markdown so I’m not too worried. I am worried about image hosting, though, because the free host package has limited space, and I don’t know how Astro’s GitHub deployment is going to work with images. Finally, I’d be limited to posting from where I can access GitHub. I don’t write on my phone, or on tablets. It’s almost always from my PC but I might someday want or decide I need to do so from a smaller, less capable device, and I suspect it would be difficult, but not impossible.

The good news is that because the hosting tier is free, I should be able to give it a shot without too much angst. If I find that it works for me and is something I want to run with, and if I make the decision to port everything from WP to Astro, then I can upgrade the host package to something with more oomph in order to store my images. That would be a long road, let me tell you, as I have 251 published posts here right now (252 if you’re reading this), and 1519 images. Thank gawd I had those blackout periods where I nuked my sites and lost a whole lot of posts or else I’d be looking at thousands of posts and a whole lot more images.

It’s Friday, though, and I don’t feel like doing anything techy right now so I’ll keep you posted on how this plan is going, once I decide to get off my ass and give it a whirl.