Something went wrong with the new site, so I’m complaining about it here.

This morning I had written a post describing my integration of Isso, a self-hosted comment system that was working quite well with the static Astro setup but when I checked the post into GitHub, the build process just started throwing errors. I hadn’t changed a damn thing on the operational side, and because GitHub Pages is kind of a black-box, I don’t know how to resolve the issue. Not that I’d know how to resolve the issue anyway.

I started looking into alternative sites because I wanted more control over the site, and it would be nice to not have to pay for hosting even though it’s an annual contract and isn’t really breaking the bank. This was never some open source crusade or anything like that, and I took it on because I was bored and looking for some kind of development-adjacent thing to work on that wasn’t rolling a new site from scratch.

I was never fully enamored with the process surrounding the writing, publishing, and maintaining of the static site. Using VSC as an editor worked, and worked better with the Front Matter CMS, but I had to modify it in order to get images up to, and reference data down from, CloudFlare so there are a few kludges involved. I was also finding that the more posts I had the longer the publish was taking (it was up to 4m 30s) which isn’t something I was annoyed by, except that I had to monitor the process so I knew when things were done so I could get the link and advertise the post as I did not have an auto-advertise plugin for static sites, and wasn’t interested in creating or cribbing one from elsewhere.

So here I am, back on WordPress. I’m not super-sad about it because at this point in my life, I value convenience more than I am willing to court frustration. 30 years ago this version of the blog would never have happened as I would have created my own — did create my own, and a few of them at that — but now I just want to log in, vomit my thoughts onto the screen, and publish them with a button click.

[Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash]