The why: Behind my SSG conversion project

I put myself in every role of building out a website to better understand how content is programmatically consumed and displayed.

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:

My WordPress homepage as of 1 May 2025

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

Legacy podcast landing page

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 The public-facing samples I did write were woefully out-of-date, as was my WordPress site. I didn’t realize just how out-of-date the site was until I got deep into this project.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:

Technical goals

Content goals

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:

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).