Thanks to blogging hype on Hacker News, I decided I’m going to write something. Here it is. The new, shiny, WordPress.

Platform

Why WordPress? First of all, I had a look at what’s popular and what’s available.

Medium. For the advantages – great typography and general reading-friendly attitude. However, I’m not very fond of Medium’s practices of paywalling and constantly asking DOWNLOAD OUR APP! IT’S SO GREAT! Just no.

Blogger. Is it still alive?

WordPress.com. Very good platform, however I wanted my blog to come on my terms. However, this comes at a price. I don’t expect this blog to gather enough interest to spend ~25 EUR each month for a Business plan – that’s the one with custom theme support.

Static site generators. I’ve considered running this blog on such a platform, but, in my opinion, it brings significant friction to the publishing process. I’ve got enough config-, devops-related work to do at my job, so I don’t want another time sink. I really appreciate projects like mkdocs, which I use extensively at my job for user documentation, but this is not the use case.

Self-hosted WordPress seems to be writer-friendly and really easy to use. Despite what ‘reviews’ say, the new Gutenberg editor is really good – well-polished, intuitive and focused on writing.

Theme

One paragraph above I said about the ‘project’ not being a time sink, yet I designed a theme from the ground up. Thing is, I needed to refresh my HTML/CSS skills, so here it comes.

The first revision wasn’t as impressive as I wanted to be.

It works well. It scales automatically (without JavaScript – we don’t need to bloat each and every page!), but looks like straight from the 90’s.

Dear borders, off you go!

Okay, it’s a bit better now.

After some fiddling with WordPress theme engine, I managed to make it behave the way I wanted to. Side note: the documentation is great; if anyone involved in the documentation on codex.wordpress.org reads this, you did a great job! For a person who knows a thing about PHP 5 and some HTML/CSS, I managed to create a theme based on the _s template and some well-documented quirks.

Content

Here I decided to get rid of my previous attempts of my blog by importing content from Tumblr. Luckily, the importer got the job done and I’ve got (a bit mangled by Tumblr) some content pre-populated. At least it doesn’t screech empty white page with no content.

Shiny thingies

As for the extra content, I didn’t test it out yet, but at least I can post when I’m bored and have a tablet (with a keyboard of course, for god’s sake). WordPress mobile app (in my case, iOS app) just works.

Also, WordPress seems like the same case as with Jenkins – there’s a plugin for that. Code highlighting? There’s a few. Caching? More than you can test.

Forecast

Oh yes, the theme is imperfect. I have a few things to fix, a few sharp corners to cut, but not now.

At least I can procrastinate thinking of the unwritten posts I’d make.