Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, January 19, 2023.
There are two reasons I am migrating over to Hugo from Wordpress. The first has to with the decline in support for the Classic or pre Gutenberg editor. The second has to do with the lack of utility in comments versus the maintenance cost of Wordpress.
Since releasing Gutenberg Wordpress has slowly been migrating all of their theming over to a collection of CSS files and a loop of php code that simply prints the blocks HTML. All of the functionality is migrating over to JS provided by the implementer of the block. This sounds like a good idea because you don’t need custom themes for adding special stuff to the top of a page or post. It does come with a problem though. If you like to write longer form material Gutenberg is not easy to use. However, if you wanted to use a lot multimedia inside your content Gutenberg is much easier than the Classic editor.
What about comments? Simple, a day or two before writing this I cleaned out the comment spam folder. It had about 350 spam comments inside it. I have gotten more positive interactions about a post on Twitter than I have ever gotten on my actual website itself. There are a handful of websites/blogs that I read with active comment sections. Active meaning less spam than actual comments. That does not mean a high signal to noise ratio however. One of the sites in particular could employee several moderators just dealing with civility and personal attacks in the comments.
Against the headache of filtering spam and uncivil discourse the use of more JS in the Wordpress ecosystem has lead to several more security problems. See (https://thehackernews.com/2023/01/wordpress-security-alert-new-linux.html) for more information about those.
Given the two previous issues I am working on migrating the website over to Hugo. It will take a few weekends for the migration to be completed. I also need to figure out some best practices for handling a few large files I have on this site without polluting the git history.
It looks like I am going to need to use a CDN for some files.
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