This is a WordPress site, first created in 2003. Why I created a WordPress blog site when I was involved in the CMS Made Simple project back then, I don’t recall.

I maintain a handful of other sites running on WordPress too. It was a lot of work until I discovered the wp command-line tool (thanks Beau!). I was able to lock down permissions of the WordPress directories, and have a nightly script that would update WordPress and all of the plugins to make sure I was up to date and (moderately) secure.

One of these WordPress sites I maintain is for an organization. The site has gone through a lot of evolution. I originally built it with a Perl-based system called “Scribe” that I wrote in 2002 or thereabouts. It used a markup-based templating system, CVS to maintain versions, and published static HTML from CGI scripts. Later, I was working on the CMS Made Simple project as part of the core team, so I ported this site to CMSMS. Eventually, I left the CMSMS project, and in 2017 I decided to migrate the site to WordPress (based on the fantasy that other people would join me and maintain content on the site). I was busy, and paid an overseas development firm to port the site for $300. The language barrier made the project difficult, and I ended up rewriting a substantial portion of the code.

This morning a security update resulted in one of the site’s plugins throwing fatal errors and taking the site completely offline. I eventually had to manually poke around in the database and modify JSON strings to resolve the problem (and disable the broken plugin).

I started reflecting on the overall functionality of the site and how it’s used. Maybe it’s time for me to move away from WordPress and go back to some static generating strategy. I hear good things about Jekyll. Of course, this would also probably involve a site redesign too. Ugh. Well, more to evaluate and think about.