Time for a change

Finally! In an effort to resist the further enshittification of the internet, our blog had to move. We were running the old blog on a US hosting company and an ancient version of Wordpress. When we set up the blog way back when (in 2015 I think) this was a convenient option. Wordpress is easy to use, and there are a gazillion templates available that make it fairly easy to set up a website that is easy on the eyes.

We can do better!

I always had this nagging feeling thought that we could do better. First of all, while Wordpress is widely successful as a CMS, it is also notorious for being a security nightmare. There are use cases where having machinery like Wordpress in place would make sense, but for our tiny blog, a static site generator would be a better fit.

Plenty of reasons

Apart from the security angle, there is also the price. We used to host the whole thing on Bluehost, and it cost us a fair penny. It's not only the website, but it's also the DNS for the camandtom.com domain, there are domain protection services one needs to pay for, backups one needs to pay for ... and the list goes on. Hosting a static website on something like Hetzner should hopefully help with keeping the costs in check.

And then of course there is the ethical angle. Can we really host our precious website on US soil, given everything that's going on over there at the moment? I don't think so. Just writing this post is probably going to get me on a handful of government checklists already, imagine hosting a whole blog there!

Zola rocks

So this is how we ended up migrating the whole thing to Zola, a static site generator written in Rust. Zola is pretty awesome, but migrating all of the content from our Wordpress site is going to take some time. So, what you are reading here is the first release of our deshitified blog, and over time we'll migrate all the content from our old blog over here.