After a long hiatus I decided to clean up my online presence and start my personal site anew.

Previously I used WordPress, but with their move to Gutenburg which never worked for me I sort of lost interest. What was once interesting was now a chore. The software felt bloated and slow as well.The last straw was an upgrade of php which killed the site, and I didn't have the energy to repair and restore it.

At time of writing this there is drama in the WordPress world as Matt Mullenweg has a techbro meltdown. The company’s work environment sounds very toxic. This alone would have me rethink using Wordpress.

ClassicPress is, or was, a possibility. Unfortunately I couldn’t overinstall it as I couldn’t access the admin panel. By the time I discovered safe mode, I had already started deleting. I’m not sure I want an sql driven site. It seems a bit overkill.

First off, cleanup. I don’t remember ftp being this slow. Using Cyberduck uploads are ok but deleting takes forever. My provider’s web based offering is better with much much faster delete. I used Transmit by Panic in the past but a system update killed my copy and it just wasn’t worth it to me to upgrade. Beautiful app though.
I need to think about the static pages I have lying about too. I’ll probably just link them here. iView Media Pro, a photo catalog app I had output great galleries. Another app that a system update killed. Then it was sold to various companies and discontinued. Wish it still ran on my current system.

I decided to go with DokuWiki

Although it’s wiki software, I’m quite comfortable with it and it lends itself to other uses. I don’t think I’m organised enough at the moment to go the static site route, either hand coded or via a generator.

The install was relatively easy. I was having trouble uploading and extracting the tarball so I used my providers one step solution. Not my first choice but it worked like a charm. I may use it to look at some other software and projects in the future.

To the standard install I needed to add several plugins for blog-like functions:

• blog
• bloglinks
• cloud
• tag

and a minimalist theme that I tweaked slightly:

• White

I need to explore getting the sidebar to look and behave properly though. I need to find the css controlling padding.

and a few other ones to make my life easier like Wrap and XBR.

Set everyone’s permissions to read only and disable registration and away we go…

Comments can happen on mastodon? (No ActivityPub in DokuWiki yet so all a bit cobbled together)