Goodbye WordPress.
I’ve had a variety of websites running on WordPress for a long time, with the most recent/current projects being the Dutch education site “Leren Leuker Maken” and my (still very bare) English education site “International SEN Group”.
My Dutch website gets a respectable number of hits on a monthly basis (anywhere between 2000 and 4000 visitors) with a range of resources being regularly downloaded and used in Dutch and Flemish classrooms.
And I hadn’t touched the design since early 2019. Needless to say, it could do with an update. I’d put that off multiple times since it was daunting prospect.
Then I finally bit the bullet
A while back, I read a post by Philipp Hauer, which made me dive into the topic again and back in January 2023, I decided to export these two websites to Hugo using the described methods on his blog.
I ended up with a range of files that needed sorting, editing and cleaning in order to run well through Blogdown. As a derivative of Hugo, Blogdown runs through R and RStudio and introduces a range of academic features (the main one being citation management linked to Zotero).
Once the academic year was over and the Summer holidays began, I continued the work I started in January and as of last week, both websites are fully WordPress free.
Are there any downsides?
The only downside at the moment is that I’ve lost the comments I had on my WordPress blogs. I don’t like Disqus and haven’t really found a clean and easy alternative, though I was looking at comment-integration through Flarum. As an MIT licensed discussion board that offers a minimalist style, it may work very well for future integration. For now, I’m putting this on the list for future consideration. My Sendy mailing lists for both Leren Leuker Maken & ISENG are growing at a healthy pace, so I feel quite comfortable reaching out to my subscribers that way. Forums are great, but they do require a level of maintenance and moderating that I don’t want to give my time to at this stage.
Is that all I’ve been up to?
Some people have been wondering if Fhaloness is still actively being developed, or wether I’m working on updates to the Time Sampling Form. The answer to these questions is very much: yes, I’m still working on these projects as well. The pace is slow, since they’re hobby projects but be sure to follow me on Mastodon for updates whenever I have something to share!