Why the Blogging Stopped

The problems began when I decided to migrate my WordPress blog to a static Hugo site instead. At the time I was obsessed with PowerShell, and I wrote several scripts to transform my WordPress blog posts to posts that would work in markdown. This was obviously a lot of work, but I managed to scrape my database and automatically create new markdown posts which in the end saved me a lot of time and meant I didn’t have to start all over again with the blog.

However, I wasn’t prepared for the performance implications by using a static site with large resources and as I started running performance tools I more or less became obsessed with improving the performance of my site. I created more scripts and added more steps to my already complicated pipeline to post. And although the selling point of static website generators is to make it easy to create new posts and deploy them, I managed to make this process slow and painful by adding too many hurdles. My process consisted of automatically resizing images, creating webp versions of all the images, uploading them to a CDN on Azure with appropriate settings, and the few more steps.

Today I decided to start blogging about writing and set up a separate website for those blog posts. I kid you not it took me merely 15 minutes to get the site up and running including two posts. Which just proves I don’t need all those fancy scripts, and I really need to look over how I can improve the performance of my main blog without having 50 different steps. At the end of the day I don’t know if the performance improvements really matter that much, because we know content is king and if the scripts prevent me from blogging frequently it doesn’t matter that I have a fast website.

So yeah, that’s the reason. And you can expect me to start blogging more, in particularly about migrating from Xamarin to Maui, which has turned into a very interesting experience. Expect to see more of me. Like it or not haha.

Why the Blogging Stopped

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