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Migrating To Plain Text : Moving Away From WordPress

K

I registered KMyers.me on June 29th, 2012 to maintain my online presence after I neglected to renew my previous domain. Since then, this website has gone through many evolutions. I started with a simple, hard-coded HTML site and later migrated to a primitive blog platform I developed in PHP in early 2013 as I was learning PHP. I decided to give up on my blog platform and join the millions of websites that were hopping on the WordPress bandwagon. This all changed over the past several months when I began the process of migrating away from WordPress, specifically to a static website generator known as MKDocs.

Security Problems

Over the past decade, WordPress has worked well enough; however, there were several severe vulnerabilities that have caused me to lose faith in the platform as thousands of websites were exploited. These were normally due to vulnerabilities in the countless WordPress plugins; however, there have also been a significant number of exploits in the WordPress core product.  No product will ever be perfect when it comes to security, and to the credit of the WordPress developers, they tend to resolve issues quickly. However, I felt like I was gambling every day my WordPress site was online - will it still be my blog when I wake up in the morning, or will it be shilling some scam crypto scheme?

WordPress Bloat

In addition to the security problems, WordPress has become more bloated with each major release. There was a time when I considered an installation of WordPress "lightweight", especially for a personal blog, but that time has long gone. It used to be possible to run a basic WordPress installation on an inexpensive shared hosting account, but lately, it seems like you will either need to upgrade to a virtual machine or at least a premium shared hosting platform if you wish to grow your blog beyond a few hundred monthly visits, or you may suffer performance issues.

Moving to MKDocs

Over the past few months, I have been working on re-building my entire website from scratch using a new platform known as MKDocs. MKDocs is a static website generator that takes in plain-text (markdown) and converts it to static HTML. This is done without any server-side rendering languages (PHP/NodeJS/ExpressJS/etc). The webroot of the project contains completely static HTML files. This is all managed with a CI/CD build pipeline that pre-renders all html files and builds all browser-side JavaScript and CSS resources before deploying the content to a global CDN.

Advantages

This has several advantages - The amount of total disk space my website consumes has dropped from 9.78 GB to 108 MB. This allows my website to be cached in RAM on a server instead of being read from the disk when someone visits it. - Exploiting my website has gotten significantly harder, if not impossible, as there is no way to run server-side code or inject any sort of XSS to manipulate or dump the contents of a database. - There is no database! This site has absolutely no databases in use, even the search is pre-rendered client-side JavaScript. - The speed of the website has improved by 8 times! - Search Engine Friendly - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is full of countless myths and snake-oil techniques that self-proclaimed "SEO Experts" will spend weeks arguing about but one thing they will all agree on is that page rendering speed and a large amount of text is important with SEO.

Remaining Tasks

I have migrated most of the content from the older site, except for my Google Plus Archive and comments. I will be working on a way to add comment support back to the website if there is a desire. I am also working on migrating my Google Plus Archive but this will take several months.