The blog you are reading is no longer WordPress. As of this week, half-built-robots is a static site built with Astro and served from Cloudflare. If I did my job right, you shouldn’t be able to tell (technically the feed moved and added some bells and whistles that I had meant to do in WordPress).
Why bother?
The honest answer is a pile of reasons that all point the same direction. A database-backed PHP application is a lot of machinery for what is, functionally, a pile of documents, and the machinery was not free: DreamHost was expensive, and every plugin was cranking out security patches at full tilt, so I spent more time updating and hardening the thing than writing in it. Styling was its own battle; I could never get the theme looking quite the way I wanted without wrestling somebody else’s CSS. And at time of writing, WordPress does not play well with AI the way a static site does.
Every post on this site is now a plain Markdown file in a git repository, which is much closer to how I actually work. Writing a post is the same motion as writing firmware: edit, commit, push. No admin panel, no patch treadmill, no database to babysit, and when I want the styling changed, I change it.
There is also a satisfying irony in this being the one migration in this blog’s history where the content actually came along. Blogger to WordPress lost things. WordPress to Astro kept every post and actually enhanced the user experience in one go. Fourth restart’s the charm, apparently.
What changed for readers?
Very little, on purpose. The site is faster, since there is no server assembling pages anymore. Search works from the magnifying glass in the header. There is a newsletter now if you would rather get posts by email than check back on my (let’s call it irregular) posting schedule.
What about the old site?
The WordPress site is happily spinning on DreamHost’s disks (or bobbing little electrons in a sea of non-volatile solid state storage) as a rollback for a few weeks, then it gets shut off for good. It is not every day one of my projects gets to be finished by design, so let the record show: the migration bridge was built, it carried every post across, and it was retired on schedule.
One more thing
A static site rebuild leaves room for the kind of feature no WordPress plugin ever offered me out of the box. I will only say this: something is being contained on this site, and containment is going fine as long as nobody goes looking for it. If you were the type to search this site for an easter egg, I would ask you not to. Whatever happens after that is on you.