That’s it, I finally killed my WordPress installation and moved the entire blog over to a static website generator.

After looking at a few frameworks I decided to go with Hexo. The config files took a few minutes to get used to, but thanks to the plugin system I managed to get almost everything I wanted.

Migrating the old posts

To get my stuff out of WordPress I used the XML export and a Python script I wrote¹ that converts the posts into Hexo-compatible markdown files. It also downloaded the embedded images and created the redirect directives so the old urls would still work.

The import went mostly fine, but I still have to go through many of the older posts to clean up the markdown.

Theming

I went with a lazy color and font variation of the excellent Cactus Dark theme by Pieter Robberechts.

Plugins, plugins, plugins

The great thing about Hexo is how easy it is to add more features to it. I ended up swapping the default markdown renderer for markdown-it-plus to get everything I need.

Syntax highlighting: just works!

def foo(syntax, highlighting='great'):
    yield 'yay'

Footnotes: couldn’t live without them².

Custom HTML: Writing markdown is great and saves a lot of time, but sometimes you just need something more.

Latex math expressions: To be fair, I only used them in one blog post in 2009 and I honestly have no idea how to write them anymore, but it’s good that the blog supports it!

What about comments?

That’s the only sad part so far. A static website has no commenting system. I thought about using Disqus, but since they now seem to run ads in the free plan, I decided against it. Maybe I’ll come up with a solution later.³

However, since the XML file included the old comments I was able to just bake them into the static markdown files, so they’re at least preserved for the future.

Why spend all this effort

Guess it’s the same reason why everyone moves away from WordPress in the end: maintainance just takes up too much work. Every other month you need to upgrade the CMS or the plugins to make sure all security holes are fixed. After a couple years you accumulate too many plugins so eventually something will break.

For me it was the login to the WordPress admin. A while ago I was freaking out about someone breaking into my WordPress — automatic bots try to login all the time — so I installed plugins protecting the login. I was even able to integrate my YubiKey! But last week, I guess some automatic update of something must have caused the whole setup to fail and I wasn’t able to get back in. It took me a couple hours to re-gain access to my own CMS⁴.