Dec 24th, 2020 - Category: Miscellaneous
Back in 2010, Wordpress was widely hailed as a breakthrough for creating modern websites and ElephantTech jumped on the bandwagon with Wordpress “Thelonious” (all their versions are named after Jazz greats). The default theme was so beautiful, a long tree lined road leading off into the distance. It was easy to get started with their famously advertised “five minute install” and they even had a handy list of hosting companies. We chose one called ICDSoft that got great reviews. They were based in Bulgaria but who cared, it was the global internet right? And the price was right, only $5 a month.
However, over the next few years the complexity of Wordpress increased exponentially. The versions named “Gershwin” and “Basie” came and went as the iPhone revolutionized the mobile internet. Suddenly websites had to look good on tiny screens. Wordpress took it in stride and created “responsive images” which meant creating five extra copies of every image on a website in different sizes. It was a bloated mess so after quite a bit of work, that “feature” was disabled. It should have been clear then that this was the beginning of the end.
As ElephantTech grew, backups became a necessary but complex add-on. Eventually our Bulgarian friends fell behind the times and ElephantTech moved to its own server on Digital Ocean. This meant becoming a security expert to prevent bots and scammers from trying to gain access to the site, but the new server was so fast it was worth it.
Next it was the Wordpress’s Gutenberg “block editor” which made it easier to create complex website layouts but unnecessary for a simple website like ElephantTech so the “Classic Editor” plugin was added. But this meant that new themes didn’t look right so the 2017 theme was put back into service. Along the way I learned about modifying themes and Wordpress’s inner workings to the point of teaching a class heavily based on Wordpress.
Finally this month, after 393 posts and 10+ years, I felt it was time to leave Wordpress and move to a system that is very popular at the moment, a “static” website. In many ways it meant coming full circle, ElephantTech started as a hand coded HTML website uploaded to a webserver manually and now the structure is very similar again. It uses something called a static site generator (Jekyll) where posts and pages are created in a simplified HTML language called Markdown. It’s a lot more technical work upfront (and converting was a HUGE job), but OH MY is ElephantTech fast, clean, and easy to update now. And what a relief, there are no more fancy scripting languages running behind the scenes, no more SQL databases to maintain / backup, and in general no more fighting the relentless tide of Wordpress “improvements.” Just 393 plain text files, 491 images, and a few configuration files that Jekyll can build into this website in less than a second.
Now THAT’S progress!