Moving away from WordPress

For quite some time now I'm unhappy with Gutenberg in WordPress, and its constant changing functionality. This breaks websites and doesn't look professional, not even for a personal blog. I've been using WordPress since the very first version of this site back in 2007 (WaybackMachine link), and I've been part of the community for as long, I contributed to Support, Docs, Hosting, Core and had a lot of fun at WordCamp EU & NL. So this was not an easy decision to make.

How do you like this yourself, @WordPress ? Not using a syntax highlighting plugin now. Also see
- https://t.co/BuoRxBp9RA
- https://t.co/SWRhQOaJ2d
- https://t.co/HBi6Ds8sao
- https://t.co/XSBLCtdh4J
- https://t.co/SixCEjd2Qc
- https://t.co/6B7IdSI1rV

It is one big mess! 😠 https://t.co/LDoH8pONdR pic.twitter.com/buK6ZgYTeG

— Jan Reilink (@Jan_Reilink) June 1, 2024

And now? .NET!

I've worked at a Windows Server and IIS based hosting company for nearly twenty years and now for a Windows server and .NET orientated software company. I've always liked (ASP).NET Framework. Therefore I'm considering either Piranha CMS, Umbraco as the CMS to migrate to. Or a Static Site Generator (SSG) like Statiq.Dev. Only downside is: programming websites is not my job or area of expertise, it just has to work, so I'll have to go with what a CMS has to offer. Especially with .NET...

After a brief test period (I've used Umbraco and Piranha CMS before), I went with Statiq as Static Site Generator. Getting my WordPress posts into it was relitivaly easy:

1. create a complete WordPress export
2. convert posts to Markdown following DAEXT's Convert WordPress Articles to Markdown post
3. regexp your way through all .md files using Visual Studio Code and Notepad++. Why doesn't Code recognize ^\[(\!\[)(.*)(\])(\(.*)(\))\](\((.*)\))$ as a valid regular expression? Anway, my replacement was: $1$2$3\($7 "$2"\). This is for optimizing images in posts.
4. run Statiq.Web and generate static HTML files
5. upload files and assets to webhost
6. now for some finetuning

Saotn.org in the near future

Migrating to a different CMS and platform means I have the opportunity to optimize, rewrite and update older posts. While doing that (a process that may take many months - there are almost 300 posts and a lot of images) I won't be publishing new posts, unless I have something really, really, reeaally interesting to mention.