I’ve been getting tired of keeping my WordPress plugins up to date for the sake of some very old blog posts, so I figured it was time I switched back to a static site generator. Last time I did this, I used Pelican, this time around I’ve picked Hugo, mostly for the chance to play with a shiny new thing. Migration wasn’t very complicated - I got most the way there by exporting my WordPress site as an XML file, and then this repo did most the heavy lifting.
I’ve recently started launching WordPress sites - starting with Talitha, and now this site. In my haste to move a few sites that seemed like they’d work better as WordPress sites, I appear to have over-loaded my single Digital Ocean droplet, so it’s time to spin up a new one. As ever with Digital Ocean, they have an incredibly good tutorial on setting up WordPress on Ubuntu1, but since I like automating things, I thought it was worth recording the steps I took (partly for my reference).
In about 1998, I was building a website for a friend. The site was entirely static. I’d already learned the hard way about the pain of trying to keep lots of separate static HTML files visually consistent. To build the site, I used a system (whose name has since faded from memory) which took as its input some template files, some files containing the content, and combined them together to build a website.