I want to start this off by saying that I've always liked Wordpress. It's a blogging tool I have used on and off for years myself and still a tool I setup for people when they want to start their own "website". It's easy to use, pretty easy to setup, and there are tons of examples of how to do things on the internet.

So I think I should add some context here.

Before I started this blog, I had a different blog with a different name where I wrote a lot about my personal experiences growing up and interesting life events. A lot of it was really personal, and writing it was always an exercise in dragging up and being able to relive memories that I long thought I had lost. It wasn't really revolutionary or anything, but it meant a lot to me because of that.

So in early 2020, it had actually been a few months since I last wrote on it, I was cleaning up some old VMs I had on a Proxmox machine without much thought and removed one called old-websites.

Right as I hit delete, it hit me what my "old websites" were.

I was pretty devastated at this point. I looked high and low for a backup, but my backups were stored on the VM itself, and I never copied them over to anything. I hopped over to the archive sites and, because I never really advertised it anywhere, it never made it onto any of those sites.

And just like that, years of stories and thoughts were gone.

In the end, though, it wasn't even a Wordpress issue that really caused me to stop using it. It was an issue with me not having a proper backup strategy.

So now I use static generated sites, not necessarily for any technical reason - just that on a slow moving site you might not update a lot, it is just a lot less overhead. There's no external database to manage and keep track of, it's just all right there in the repo with a log full of useful commits like "Testing".