The "why" behind my SSG conversion project

I’ve always been curious about and dabbled in software development. I’ve built websites starting in 1996, including the WordPress site I built in 2008.

That site and its scope expanded when I started my podcast in 2015. When I decided to update my site, 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.
• Update my portfolio from a clean slate.
• Understand how content is programmatically consumed and displayed to users.

Lastly, taking on this project was strategic. I don’t have any recent writing samples that I could share with potential employers 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 The public-facing samples I did write were woefully out-of-date, as was my WordPress site. I didn’t realize just how out-of-date the site was until I got deep into this project.

Technical goals

• Update a 10-year-old design.
• Retire a complex WordPress site that didn’t get much traffic and needed maintenance.
• Quickly (“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 leverage old ones like 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

This includes financial and labor savings:

• 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.
  • I had to upgrade 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 burden to a paid service.
  • Downsizing from a web host I’d undergrown meant I could re-allocate those resources.
  • While this solution is cheaper in long-term financial cost, the initial investment in setting up my own infrastructure, as well as the ongoing added mail server administration, may be a factor for some people.

The what

Choosing a static site generator