Moving away from WordPress
Posted on 18 September, 2023
As I wrote previously I've decided to move this site off BlueHost (for both hosting and domain registration) and as part of the move will need to also move away from using WordPress.
I decided that I wanted to use Eleventy as my static site generator — I like it's simplicity and flexibility, and for this site there's not going to be any complicated or reactive interfaces that would push me towards using React (and therefore Gatsby).
The setup is quite simple:
- a homepage that has the most recent post "in full" and then a digest of the next three posts
- the main blog (which I've termed "the archive") — with four posts to a page, shortened to a digest if they're too long
- a link to my "dashboard"
- an about page
For wider screens I want the content to be split into a main 'content' column and a narrower side-column that contains a 'tag cloud'; the tags need to be auto-generated, and each of them needs to link to an auto-generated page with a list of all the tagged posts.
I'm going to write several posts that set out how (and why) I've built this, which hopefully will be of useful to anyone who's interested in doing something similar.
