The why: Behind my SSG conversion project

I knew from an early age I’d be involved in writing in some way. I interviewed friends on cassette in elementary school. I had my own 'zine. But since the days of the Commodore VIC-20, I’ve always been curious about and dabbled in software development. I started building websites in 1996, which led me to a Drupal site, and also a WordPress personal site I built in 2008:

That site and its scope expanded when I started my podcast in 2015:

Actually starting this project was strategic. I don’t have any recent writing samples to share with potential employers or clients due to intellectual property (IP) laws, which I take seriously. The public-facing samples I did write were woefully out-of-date, as was my WordPress site. I didn’t realize just how out-of-date the site was until I got deep into this project.

When I decided to update my site ten years later, getting seriously hands-on appealed to me. This was a rare greenfield opportunity to:

• Audit a lifetime’s worth of content dating back to LiveJournal blogs.
• Get rid of cruft.
• Reduce costs.
• Understand how content is programmatically consumed and displayed to users.
• Learn some new skills without a lot of deadline pressure.
• Explain to others what starting a site from scratch entails.

Technical goals

• Update a 10-year-old design.
• Retire a complex WordPress site that didn’t get much traffic and needed maintenance.
• “Quickly” revamp my website to increase my chances at getting hired.
• Add value by developing with SSGs, which isn’t a skill a lot of technical writers have.
• Learn newer technologies (that ended up leveraging old ones I’m very familiar with — HTML and CSS).

Content goals

• A steady stream of content to drive traffic and show as writing samples.
• Give back by documenting the static site implementation process.
• Review all the content on my site and see if and how it’s promoting me in the best light.
• Decide whether to archive old content, like those very early blog posts.
• Understand how to structure content not only for SSGs, but other programmatic use.
• Enjoy writing again.
• Do something for me.

Cost savings goals

My web host (mddhosting) is great and worth the cost while I was actively updating the site. I no longer needed the complexity and related costs of it, so my goals were to reduce my financial and labor costs:

• Minimize the overhead of maintaining a content management system. I no longer needed the complexity of a self-managed WordPress site. I hadn’t blogged in some time, and my podcast has been on hiatus since 2022 (stay tuned…). Maintenance included:
  • Keeping up with plugin updates.
  • WordPress updates.
  • Processing the hundreds of spam comments that came through every day.
• Reduce hosting costs. SSGs don’t require heavy infrastructure such as a database, so they can be hosted in places that WordPress sites can’t. This gave me flexibility to move to a zero- or low-cost host. That doesn’t mean there are zero costs to hosting the site:
  • My existing site host was also my mail server, so I had to find and set up my own mail hosting. To add to the frustration, my first choice was too difficult to set up.
  • Upgrading my podcast hosting. My podcast archive puts me at the limit of free disk space and bandwidth on GitHub, so I had to offload that to a paid service. The upside to this is I get metrics I wouldn’t if they were self-hosted.
  • Downsizing from a web host I’d undergrown meant I could re-allocate those resources.

While this solution is cheaper in long-term costs, there was considerable investment in upskilling, setting up infrastructure, creating templates, and making mistakes. I took on mail server costs and administration (which so far has been minimal).