WordPress? What else?

After spending 15 years on WordPress, George Clooney (if he were an infrastructure guy rather than a coffee icon) would probably have looked at me and said, “WordPress… what else?”

But here’s the thing: my requirements for a personal home on the web have changed. I still remember my first two bare-metal servers running Debian, NGINX, and MySQL. Back then, I thought running a personal site on a full CMS was the only way. For this rebuild, I originally thought the easy path was just to spin up a VPS, install some standard CMS software, configure NGINX, cook it all together with a few terminal commands, and call it a day.

But I stopped and asked myself: Do I really need to manage a runtime stack for a site that’s basically text and images?

The Needs

I wanted a website that was:

• Simple and frictionless: Like posting on X, but without arbitrary character limits, algorithm nonsense, or media constraints.
• Blazing fast: Fast to load, light on the wire, and completely responsive on any screen.
• Low-maintenance: I spend my days building and managing complex stuff for work. I don’t want to spend my weekends patching security holes in yet another CMS or maintaining runtime environments or servers.
• Streamlined layout: All posts accessible directly from the homepage.
• Flexible format: A clean design that supports various post typeswhether it’s a long-form essay, a quick code snippet, or a simple URL bookmark with some commentary.

The Escape Route

Initially, I thought about going retro and writing raw HTML with Bootstrap. But after a weekend spent sketching out the design and rethinking my workflow, I decided to take a gamble on Astro.

Static site generation, zero client-side JavaScript by default, and a dev experience that feels incredibly clean. I migrated everything, pushed it to git, and I’m never looking back.