After switching to WordPress almost 17 years ago, I’m done. Out. Finished.

In 2009, WordPress was The Thing. Prior to that, I had a homebrewed static site generator, more or less. It generated the index pages and slapped a header/footer on each generated page. Although I used various iterations of this for a dozen years, it had major shortcoming. I had to mostly edit posts by hand; images were a major pain; and the look and feel of the thing was not great. I also had to be in front of my laptop at home to edit a post.

I think I’d already been using WordPress for my music review blog (which died quickly, don’t ask) and after a big painful import process that involved too much use of the sed program and the ugliest shell script imaginable, I got everything into a self-hosted WordPress install.

WordPress had its advantages. Themes were great. It looked modern. I could easily log in from work or my phone or anywhere else and peck out a post. Things like comments were already included. And when I had a multi-person blog for the old publishing company, it wasn’t too terrible to set up other people to also edit things.

WordPress also had many fatal flaws. First of all, it was basically a vector for every possible Russian hacker imaginable, who were constantly on a global hunt to crack every WordPress site they could and turn it into a boner pill ad. This happened a few times on the old PL site, and luckily not at Rumored. You were also at the whim of the WP developers for updates and changes. When they switched to a more WYSIWYG editor with “blocks” in it, I almost jumped ship, until I found a way to turn back on the legacy editor.

I think the biggest pain in the ass was the perception that you could do anything with WordPress and it had a rich ecosystem. But any time I wanted to switch themes, I found most free themes were garbage, years old and unmaintained. Paid themes, sure. But I’m not paying thousands of dollars for a personal blog only three people read. Also there was this plugin architecture, and you’re supposed to be able to totally customize your site, but once again the freemium mode was a curse, and if you added more than a couple plugins, your site would slow to a crawl.

Another big thing was that I had all my posts in a screwy database format, and any thoughts about exporting them to another format to make a book or another site involved a graduate-level computer science project, or a plugin from someone in Yugoslavia that simply did not work.

So, done.

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I’ve been doing the Markdown thing for a decade at work, writing with little symbols for italics and bold and headings, then using a static site generator to convert all of that into HTML and pour in templates and indexes and such. So I’ve thought about switching to a SSG for a long time. But the longer I waited, the worse this proposition got. I think there are about 1500 posts here, and 1.25 million words. So it’s not an easy lift.

I originally started using Jekyll at work in 2015, which suffers from the same WordPress freemium problem for themes and such, and definitely does not work well at that scale. Hugo is a bit better, but I never got it to look great. I use Gatsby for my other blog and that’s okay, but I kept sleeping on this for a while.

Anyway, I eventually thought about Astro, and that seemed to tick most of the boxes. I got a download of the WordPress export of this site, then broke it up into Markdown with a script that actually worked. After a quick setup and maybe two days of messing around, I got everything pretty much running here.

Another change is that I moved my hosting from AWS Lightsail to Vercel. And the actual files here live in GitHub. So Vercel watches the branches there and automatically does the builds and deployment. Easy stuff, and it wasn’t hard to get that running at all.

There are probably a lot of little things I need to fix here, broken links and style problems and such. There aren’t comments, and maybe I will add them back. (Or maybe not.) I need to spend some time on this, but I also need to say “done” and leave it alone.

The one disadvantage to this whole system: I’m now editing and publishing in the same tools I use at work: writing in VSC, testing in the command line, pushing changes with GitHub. Leaving work and then trying to be mindful and write, but sitting in the same exact programs is going to take some getting used to. Maybe I’ll write in something else, then paste it in here.

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Other news is that I got another draft of Atmospheres 2 done, and I hope this is the second-to-last one. After I left it ferment for a week or so, I’ll start a heavy edit pass and hopefully get that done soon.

I recently moved this site. It’s still at rumored dot com, of course. And it’s hopefully somewhat of an invisible transition. But it was pulling teeth there for a bit. Let me explain.

I first registered this domain on November 16, 1998. Prior to that, this blog (which wasn’t called a blog yet, because that term barely existed) lived over at Speakeasy, the hosting provider that was previously an internet cafe in Seattle. In 1998, I registered for a hosting account at Pair dot com, probably because Michael was using them for his site. I also registered the domain rumored dot com. The site went through various iterations of a static site, eventually using a static site generator I wrote before static site generators were A Big Thing, and then eventually it ended up in self-hosted WordPress.

That was going okay for decades I guess. I’d get a big bill every November, I’d pay it, and I’d have somewhat average service for the next 12 months. Pair was never blindingly fast or very leading-edge on their offering, but it worked reliably, and there was little fuss. Using some new wiz-bang hosting thing like Vercel or whatever would give me one-click whatever and the latest stacks and toys and apps and whatnot. But for just straight-up Apache/PHP/MySQL and no complications, Pair worked.

For a while, this was slightly frustrating because I was working with Ruby on Rails, then learning way more PHP, and I had grandiose ideas of doing the Next Big Multimedia Thing somehow, writing a database-backed CMS that had some weird image component or collaborative wiki something-or-other. And I’d write Rails stuff on my home machine and then not really have a way to deploy it to Pair. Or I’d come up with some PHP behemoth and then copy it over, and it would constantly time out on their machines. I gave up on that eventually. Wordpress more or less worked. I thought about moving to Ghost or some real CCMS system, but once you get well past a thousand entries into a WordPress blog, moving it elsewhere is like moving houses when you have more than 20,000 books. You can’t do it on a whim.

So life went on. And then this year, my annual bill went up like 75%, to $455, and was promptly autocharged to my card without me thinking about it. My fault for not paying attention, I guess. But then I went to dig into exactly which plan I had, and it turns out I was grandfathered into an ancient plan that didn’t exist anymore, and was stuck on some old hosting system or something. Like I was paying something like $42 a month, and a $5.99 a month plan on their pricing page touted like ten times the disk space and bandwidth I was throttled down to. Also, $42 a month isn’t your annual bill. These are GrubHub prices; order a $5 hamburger and a $5 drink, and your total after all the chickenshit fees is $47.

Pair used to be a great independent company, and they got bought and then sold and bought again, and they’re now owned by some Dutch company who has an About Us page that looks like it was written by ChatGPT. My billing inquiry was answered accordingly, and instead of any attempt to work with me or give me a slight discount, I got a big cut and paste of a press release or something, and was informed I could move my stuff to another hosting system, which see above about moving a giant site. And why should I reward this place with my business for running in this fashion?

I told S about this and she mentioned working on a marketing project for a large bank who shall go unnamed (they have “of America” in there somewhere) and when she asked why people would stay even thought they planned on screwing up rates and terms, the bank’s one-word answer was “inertia.” I felt the same way when a savings account I had for twenty years was suddenly paying a fifth the interest as an account that any new customer would get. In that case, I just opened a second account and moved my money over. But that didn’t involve a maze of redirected URLs, byzantine scripts I wrote ten years ago and have completely forgotten about, and a gigantic MySQL database.

Anyway. I looked at my options, and chose the path of least resistance. I went over to AWS and spun up a Lightsail Wordpress instance with something like 40x as much disk space and who knows how much faster for $7 a month, and the first three months were free. I exported the old WP instance, imported it to the new one, and after maybe a few hours of futzing, I had it more or less working the same. So I pointed the domain to the new one, and that’s that.

There are a few things that did not make the move, which is fine. I had a bunch of loose pages outside of WordPress for books that aren’t even published anymore, and those are gone. The old Paragraph Line web site that has zero traffic is dust. I think there are some little theme-based things that may be off, but it’s all mostly fine. HTTPS was a brief bump in the road, but it’s now working. The Lighthouse score is about 5 higher, and the rest of that is the fault of WordPress. And if I ever decide I need another site or a CDN or any of the other 863 things AWS does, it’s a click or three away.

A side note I almost forgot about: email. Pair has a system for putting a bunch of email addresses on the domain. There’s a largely useless webmail page and a completely useless spam filtering system, so I was just routing all of it to a free gmail account. Setting up an mx rule at the domain level to send all of the email to Google was a problem (I forget why) and shopping for some other place to handle my email was a nightmare. I could definitely throw fifty bucks a month at some SaaS Solution For Your Enterprise Email Needs. It was far easier to hold my nose and sign up for a Google Workspace account and point Rumored at that. I ran into some circular argument auth crap when I set this up, trying to keep jkonrath@gmail alive and point jkonrath@rumored at it, but I eventually got that figured out. This $7 a month is $7 more than 0, but it increased my disk space from 15 to 60GB and added a whole suite of Google apps I will probably never use.

There is some nostalgic thing about walking away from something you’ve used daily for 27 years. The Pair account reminds me of the start of my writing in Seattle, and all the years I blogged in New York, and the various book sites and other schemes I ran from that host. It makes me reminisce about the era when PHP was king and I was struggling to learn more about it. It was a constant through many moves and cities and eras and lifetimes. But, it’s just a host, I guess. I’m still sitting at a Bash prompt when I ssh to the new place. I’m still typing into the same WordPress editor as I write this. Everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed.

Anyway. I’m out that $455, which is stupid. If I get time, I’ll start doing more new stuff with the new hosting, maybe. Or maybe I’ll start actually posting here more next year.

A few vague thoughts on blogging and such on a lazy Sunday, which seems to be the only day I can ever pay attention to this thing.

I keep thinking about what I want to do here and how this blog should evolve (or whatever.) I sometimes think the big retirement project should be a grand reunification of all my content everywhere, into a giant meta-site of sorts, where one could see a mass of texts and books and pictures and videos and emails and whatever else, all poured into some giant Project Xanadu-esque thing. This is obviously something well beyond the ability of Wordpress, because it can barely handle what I’ve got going here already.

Anyway, one of the bummers about this blog has been performance. I started using Pair to host this thing last century, and while they’ve always been rock-solid, they’ve also been somewhat dated in their offerings and tools. I mean, when I thought I needed to move from Wordpress to some thing I wrote in Rails or whatever, I basically found it impossible to do anything except PHP unless I moved up a level or two on my package. Lately, I’ve been discouraged by the general performance and the fact that I have no CDN and this thing is hosted in Pittsburgh.

To be fair, it’s hard to tell if my site’s performance is because of my connection, the server I pay for, Wordpress, my configuration of Wordpress, or the sheer size of this thing. I’ve been looking with the P3 Plugin Profiler on the back end, and PageSpeed Insights on the front. I’ve messed around with the plugin config and switched SEO plugins, and that bought me about a half-second on page loads. I have no idea on how any of this works, but the general advice, in order, is to shell out for a good host, shell out for a CDN, look at your image situation, cut down the number of plugins, and cut down as much CSS stuff as you can. I think there are little tricks that could get this working slightly better, like switching themes, moving my archives links to another page, building my WP statically and hosting that in a CDN, or maybe finally giving up on WP and moving to Hugo or Jekyll or something else. I vaguely looked at moving to Ghost or moving to a hosted WP instance in Lightsail. The former was too limiting and the latter didn’t buy me much performance. It’s silly for me to waste time on this with the low amount of traffic this thing sees, but it’s an itch that’s hard to stop scratching.

The other thing I keep thinking of is funnels. How do people read this? How do they find it? Why do they stay? How do they come back? I don’t really market this thing at all, and I don’t fit any niche box that would make this go viral or get regular traffic. This is mostly me screaming into the void and hoping I can come back later and find something.

It makes me think back to the days of things like web rings and having a big list of favorite blogs on a page to find others and whatever else we used to do. This thing has an RSS feed, but it seems like nobody uses RSS anymore. I still use Feedly to read stuff, but everyone except three blogs have abandoned it. Is this because Google Reader is dead and nobody uses it, or is there some other reason like people “steal” content from feeds? No idea.

I think changes in the Google algorithm have made blogging organic content for the sake of organic content a lost cause. Twenty years ago, I could search for people involved in some niche hobby and find actual people, but now I just get travel links and shoe ads. I guess the big funnels are social media, but I don’t know that people leave their respective walled garden to go elsewhere and read content. And I can’t really post this stuff on TikTok or something. I guess if I had really snappy pull quotes, I could take just the text of that and put it over a video of a beach and play five seconds of a Taylor Swift song over it and people might see it. But not only is that work, it’s also stupid. I also keep thinking about how I’ve done mostly nothing with Substack, and maybe I should be pouring this stuff into that so people find it. Or not? I don’t know.

So, funnels. It’s an open question. I don’t know how I find content myself, let alone what others do.

The other big blocker here is I am far too busy with my own writing, and in deep on a project. I’m trying to finish the 18th book, or what I think might be the 18th. This thing originally started as a collection of short stories like The Failure Cascade, but it’s now almost as long as my second-longest book and will probably surpass it very soon. I’m trying to land this one by the end of the year, but every time I wrap up some little missing thing, I leave notes on three others. I think back in August, I thought I’d get this thing wrapped up by the first of September. Now we’re going into the back half of October, and I’m hoping December. Not a big deal if it’s not.

Starting in 2010, I forced myself to release at least a book a year, and got two on many of those years. It was one of those dumb self-publishing rules I thought I had to do, get something out to keep the long tail long, keep myself relevant, whatever. I now see no importance in that. I think I had a deep fear that if I missed a year, I’d miss two years, and then I’d wake up a decade later and wonder what happened.

I feel like I did that after Rumored was released - I did little things here and there, but I feel like the 00s were basically a lost decade for me. And I regret that, but I think the twist is that if I’d been productively writing that whole time, even without releasing anything, I would have been content with my output. And 2021-2023 were a wash for me, but I’ve kept busy this year, and that’s all that matters.

Lazy Sunday and I have not updated in a while. I’d normally do some giant bulleted list, but I’m out of bullets, so I’ll just ramble for a bit.

The main reason I haven’t updated is because I’ve been busy writing. After almost two years of trying to write and failing, I decided to shift my writing hours. Since 2010 when I started working from home on east coast time, I would write religiously from 3 to 5 PM. This started to fall apart when my work started shifting to the west coast office, and eventually, I found myself either working from 6 to 6 every day, or finishing early and being in a complete daze, unable to write. Moving to the hybrid schedule and being in the city half the time also made this schedule impossible. So, I decided on the early shift. I started waking up at 3:45 every morning, and writing until 7. It takes a minute to get my head on straight every morning, and I’m usually blacking out at about 7 or 8 at night. But it’s been very productive with the writing. It’s good to completely block out everything and spend the time in the shower thinking about the writing, then brain dump it all for a few hours, and start the work day relaxed, knowing the writing is done for the day.

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I don’t like to talk too much about works in progress, especially because my hard drive is littered with projects that never did and probably never will see the light of day. But the current one is a book of 20 stories, maybe a sort of successor to The Failure Cascade and Vol. 13. The main difference is that it’s much longer; it’s currently twice as long as Failure Cascade and not done yet. Most of my books were flash fiction, maybe what’s called a short-short story, between a thousand and two thousand words. FC had one story that was 5,000 words. This book has maybe five stories that long; one is three times that long. There’s still a lot of abstraction to the stories and it’s definitely not Raymond Carver or something. I don’t know if this is at all interesting to the reader, but I’ve enjoyed stretching things out a bit. The book has a title and a cover, which is a new one for me; I usually wait until the thing is 90% done (or more) and then freak out about what to do about that. I’d like to wrap this up by the end of the year, but I’m not too worried if that doesn’t happen.

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Something else I’ve been doing is a slight variation on the Richard Feynman method of “favorite problems.” His method was to come up with a list of a dozen big-picture problems he wanted to solve in his lifetime. Then, as he found new lessons, new sources, new information, or new inspiration, he’d take that and see how it applied to these open questions.

I’ve been bouncing around between projects too much, and have too many dead manuscripts and morgue files of pieces and parts lying around. So I started a list. And right now, half of the dozen and a half things I have on my list are dealing with reissues of old books (or not), but roughly eight of them are full-sized book projects. Aside from the aforementioned book, two others are 100,000+ word manuscripts that are past the first draft point, but in heavy disrepair. I still have this idea for “The Big Book” which is vaguely outlined and would be a 400,000-word, four-story novel that covers a few disparate things that all weave together perfectly by the end. I have a nostalgia book about the 90s (although I’m done with nostalgia) and there’s enough travel junk here to make a book or two, but I’m not interested in either.

Anyway, the method has been useful, because when I stall out on something, I go to the next thing on the list that interests me, or I start digging through the few million words I have in these various junk files and see what can be harvested for what.

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Something that’s not on the list is what to do with this and with all my other social media or whatever. I have a professional blog I haven’t touched since I posted about my MBA two years ago. I have the KonStack, which is largely dormant because I can’t figure out what goes there versus what goes here.

There are three basic problems, not to go into a diatribe about this:

1. Each different content pool has a different persona, and trying to focus on what I should be writing in each different place brings out this crippling self-censorship which totally blocks me.
2. The content pools have a certain overlap and I never know what to put where. Like when I take a nifty picture, does it go to Instagram? Do I use it as a heading here? Is it part of a Substack post? Do I need to go back to Flickr?
3. There are various dumb rules and requirements and problems that set exceptions to each pool. For example, this blog is public. I can assume that it’s being read by family members who I don’t want to read my stuff, and I have to limit what I say here. I have a completely locked down Facebook group where I post the most obscene or crazy memes and thoughts, but it only reaches a maximum of 40 people. Nobody looks at Flickr, ever. Certain stuff is only going into books, so I don’t want to burn it on posts and then have someone who buys the book realize they already read 37% of it months ago.

Etc. The real solution is to write what I want and not dictate what I do by what works for the algorithm or what other people expect or want or do. That’s what I’ve been doing, but it obviously means I do a lot less here and on other sites.

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I think travel is about done for the year. I had this wise idea that I was going to leave the country the week of the election, and blocked the time off. Then a couple of weeks ago, I threw my back out in probably the worst episode imaginable, and it completely immobilized me for almost a week. I spent about four days on the couch, unable to even sit up.  My back often goes out after flying halfway around the world, and it’s been getting increasingly worse. In Vietnam, I was completely immobile for the first morning I was in Saigon, and thought I was in serious trouble.

Now I’m starting to doubt my ability to take such long trips anymore. My back is mostly better now, maybe 90%. But I’m in food jail until further notice, so I can get some of this weight off my lower spine. And I’ll do whatever stretches and exercises they give me to do. Flying to Europe or whatever next month is out of the question. We might have some holiday travel, but that sort of depends on what happens next month, and I don’t want to get into that.

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I fired the con artist dentist who did my Invisalign earlier this year. When I got it taken off, he did a half-ass job getting the attachments off, and then started in on me about how I needed four crowns redone immediately, at a cost of five grand each. The last crown I had done was like $1800, and insurance picked up half of it. So, done. I went back to my old dentist, who is in a dead mall just south of where we used to live in South San Francisco. He did a few x-rays and said I needed a hundred-dollar filling at the root line of a back crown, and he polished off one of my front teeth that had the remainder of an attachment button on it, which was driving me nuts. I love this guy, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the mall is imploded and he retires, but I’ll keep going back to him until then.

It’s always weird to be back in the old neighborhood, and it gives me such 2008-2009 flashbacks. But it’s also changing very quickly, and a lot of what used to be car washes and fast-food joints on El Camino have quickly become vast 5-over-1 apartment buildings. Parts of the strip are the same, but others are radically different now. I decided to stop for lunch at an old favorite, which really hit the spot. The weather was perfect, and this was the first I’d left the house since the back incident.

I went to this low-key Mexican bar and grill, an unassuming brick building with a big hand-painted Fifties-looking sign and a horse statue on the roof, and a mural on the brick wall that just said “RESTAURANT - BAR.” Inside, two old guys nursed drinks at the bar, locked into a soccer game on the screen. A Mexican family were just finishing up lunch, but I otherwise had the place to myself. Aside from the TVs and the credit card machine, the inside of that restaurant could have been 1961 or 1979 or 2008. I got an incredibly good chimichanga plate for twenty bucks, a food jail furlough. I need to do that more often, instead of just shame-eating twenty bucks of Crunchwrap in my car. It was incredibly relaxing, as was the walk to my car and back.

Anyway. Time to reset for the week and avoid the Sunday Scaries.

Some site news here: I finally enabled SSL here, so HTTPS works properly, and that stupid warning goes away in Chrome. I’ve put off doing this, because I thought it involved buying SSL certs from my domain place, and I didn’t want to pay a monthly charge for it. Turns out I was able to click a button in the admin panel, tell it to use Let’s Encrypt, and change one character in my WordPress config. HTTP requests now redirect to HTTPS, and that’s that. I’m sure there’s some dumb thing somewhere that gets tripped up and goes to the wrong thing, but it seems to be mostly functional? I think the various links scattered around the site need to be changed, but I have a list of a dozen other things I need to fix, so I’ll get to it.

I very vaguely remember in 1995, I documented a commercial web server at Spry/CompuServe, and we rushed out a new version that glued in the ability to use HTTPS. We also slapped SSL support into Spry Mosaic. I only remember a few distant details of this, like there were competing standards, S-HTTP and HTTPS, and we supported both, but Netscape supported HTTPS, so S-HTTP died. Also there were almost no sites that supported SSL; you had to pay Netscape five grand in 1995 dollars to get a secure version of a server, and e-commerce was mostly a vague rumor at this point. I vaguely remember CompuServe partnering with a drop-ship company with a portal to quickly throw some store to sell junk you’d normally get for free at a trade show for insane prices, like you could pay $50 for a t-shirt. Anyway, I did virtually nothing except write an addendum for Marc VanHeyningen and the whole thing was a moot point; Internet Explorer killed Spry Mosaic, because why would you pay a hundred bucks for a web browser in a box on floppy discs.

Not really related: I vaguely looked at moving this site to AWS Lightsail, and did an experiment with that. (One of the features included in this is that it would support SSL out of the box, but who cares now.) I spun up an instance in AWS with WordPress preinstalled, and then did an export and import of this blog. All the posts came across, but none of the media, themes, plug-ins, or site config made it. A quick test or two showed a very slight performance boost, but not enough to justify the labor involved. It would be nice to have the site on a CDN, and it would save me a few bucks a month in hosting fees. But it would involve moving my mail config, and I’m sure I’m forgetting three or five other things that would need to change. It’s not entirely worth it for the ten views a day I get on here.

Side note: the latest Word on Mac doesn’t open any of the files I wrote back at Spry/CompuServe. I think they were in Word 95, or maybe even Word 6.0. I had to download a copy of LibreOffice to open them up. That seems dumb, but they’re also almost 30 years old. It’s always scary to look at writing that old, and this is no exception.

Anyway. That was easy enough. Now I need to fix all the other little things that came up during the move to the new theme. And maybe figure out how to make this thing faster.