This website was previously powered by a self-hosted WordPress, running on a
VPS. In front of that, sat Cloudflare and its
APO
product that helped to speed it up and reduce burden on the origin.
The origin server was an old-school, janky, LAMP stack. In spite of the rest of
the world seeming having ditched LAMP (or its ilk) and performing a chain of
moves from the hottest static site framework year-to-year, I took a certain joy
in the legacy. I liked the fact I was dogfooding the experience of taking a weak
origin and magically turning it into something that can operate at Internet
scale with a few button clicks.
Lately though, there’s been a bit of bluster in the world of WordPress. I have
little skin in that game, other than as an end-user of a software product that I
have to run and maintain. That meant having posts on the matter thrust into my
WordPress dashboard under the “Wordpress News and Events” panel. Sure, I can
remove that panel, but it used to have some value. Abusing the panel to
inundanate me with WordPress politics is not cool. And the more I’ve read, the
more it seems like there are some very blurry lines between the WordPress
open-source project, WordPress foundation, wordpress.org, wordpress.com,
WPTavern.
This site is simple and has infrequent content updates. WordPress was really
overkill for my needs. However, maintaining it did have some toil. wordpress.org
decided to tell me in my dashboard that they had blocked some sites from their
update servers. Am I next? Probably not. Yet, the fussing about I’ve seen on the
Internet the past couple of weeks has given me the kick up the arse to finally
ditch WordPress. I started the migration away from WordPress a few days ago,
and in the meantime the situation has continued to escalate in absurdity. In the
words of Blumhouse, its time to say NOPE, GET OUT.
