Well, I've been alluding to this now for a few months, but I've finally pulled the plug on the old site and migrated everything over to a set of flat files with Hugo powering the generation. I'm using Surge for hosting and will be upgrading to the paid plan (all of 10 bucks) as soon as possible.
I already blogged about the process a few days ago, so I don't have anything to add to it, but I can say that - as always - my concern is to ensure that folks can come here to learn new things, talk about technology (and kittens!), and find value in this site as a whole.
As far as I know, everything should have migrated over except for my old blog attachments. I had about 800 megs, yes, 800 megs, of attachments associated with blog posts, and frankly, most of those were a minimum of two years old or older. So for now, I'm not shipping any of them, but on a case by case basis will restore them - most likely to my Amazon S3 bucket.
I want to be clear that I think WordPress is a damn fine platform, but I don't want to worry about my server going down due to some misconfiguration or XML-RPC hack. I'm also extremely impressed with Google's Cloud Platform technology. I found it easier than Amazon's and in general, it just plain worked well. My costs were never too high (around 20-25 bucks per month or so) and everything pretty much worked as it should.
If you do run into anything weird, just drop me a comment below.
And in case you're curious, my first site, before even the blog, looked like this:
Don't even ask me what I was thinking about when I chose those colors.
Archived Comments
Looks great! I love flat files for my blog.
In moving to a flat file approach, what options are there for search other than Google? I guess the main key here is outsourcing any "moving parts"? Could you still roll your own search and incorporate that as a basic feature? Note - the Google search seems to work well, but thinking about uses where customers may not want to depend on external sources.
A few months ago I saw a JavaScript-based search engine. It kept an index of data in memory and you were responsible for generating that index yourself. I didn't try it, but it would be one way of doing it. I'd only recommend it if your site was - static (heh) - ie, like a company web site or some such and not a blog which would grow in content over time.
Looks slick! Nice job.
I think many of us were a bit colour blind in the 1990's when designing websites! Back then I think the technical achievements were more appreciated than they are now. Too many things taken for granted now.
For a recent client I started using www.keyCDN.com to automatically pull static files published to my server. The CDN caches the files for as long as you specify so hits to the original server can literally be nil while the CDN takes the full hit until you update any content. It even works with cfml pages and downloads (docs, videos, etc) too. They can set up a free SSL cert and of course you can use a CNAME to make the URL fit with your own domain. It's only 4c per GB/month for bandwidth. No cost for storage. Incredibly easy to set up and very fast. I just thought this was a relevant plug, well worth looking at. Connects to blogging apps too.
Looks great Ray!
What is Cold Fusion? haha
Heh - I didn't notice the space!