I can’t quite remember, but I’m pretty sure the last time I made any updates or changes to my personal website was well over six years ago. Frankly, that’s unacceptable, but it’s my own fault.

Every time I built a new site, I’d want to try and do something new and exciting – a new CMS, or a custom CMS, or a combination of the two. Inevitably what always happened was that I built it and then found it too awkward to keep updated and eventually just lost interest. This was doubly disappointing for multiple reasons. Firstly, I still like to pick up the odd freelance contract, and having a stale, outdated website just slows down that flow significantly. Secondly, I was trying to prove to myself that I could use the new shiny thing and it was as good as the old one. It wasn’t. And lastly, I like to write and share and having barriers to that just made me give up.

So, after switching web hosts so that I could get more hands on experience with K8s and Docker, I decided now was the time.

I outlined my requirements as follows;

• It needs to be easy to use, update and create content for.
• It needs to be stable!
• It needs to be easy to customise.
• As I’m not a designer, it needs to have some decent themes available – or be easy to create some.
• Has to run in Docker.

So, with my little list in hand, off I went and, well look. It’s WordPress, OK?

I’ve resisted WordPress for a long time as I never viewed it as a proper CMS. I also found it to be awkward to work in and easy to break in the past. But, it’s been a good ten years since I last used it, so I figured I’d give it a go again and, I must say, I was quite surprised.

I quite like the new content editor. It’s simple, clean and stays out of the way. The updated API is a nice touch; although I’ll probably never use it directly. And, because there are some things that just don’t change, RocketTheme’s Gantry framework is available for it, too, meaning all those years building Joomla templates using it haven’t entirely gone to waste.

The most difficult part was setting up persistent storage in K8s, if I’m honest, and that was down to a weird issue I had in Linux with copy and paste doing strange things to paths.

So, now it’s all up and running and shiny, and I feel motivated to get writing again. Will I stick with it beyond about 6 months? Who knows. But at least it won’t be because of the site this time.