WordPress and Migrations, Oh My

I really intended to spend the rest of my blogging life, such as it is, on self-hosted WordPress. It satisfies my basic needs: I control my own data and I can type words into it from pretty much anywhere. (I’m using Obsidian right now, in fact.) It is not a perfectly resilient platform in that it’s dynamically served, so I need the developers to continue to patch and update it or it’ll wind up as a security flaw, but WordPress.org always looked pretty stable and has been fine for a long, long time.

Welp.

I’m not convinced that current events require me to move from a practical standpoint. There are enough websites using WordPress so that there’s strong motivation for someone to continue maintaining the open source version or a fork of said version. For a while, at least, but that removes the immediate urgency.

However, I think practically speaking I should understand how I’d move.

There is no dynamic blogging platform, self-hosted or not, that fits my needs. Basically that’s a longevity issue; every migration means I’m losing a bit of fidelity. Redirects I didn’t handle right, weird custom WordPress shortcodes, all that jazz. If you look you can see the places where my migrations between MovableType and Tumblr and WordPress screwed up small details. Nobody notices but me, I know.

Still, if I’m gonna migrate yet again, I’d like to wind up with something as simple as possible on the back end. This probably means a static site generator. That’s cool, there are plenty of those.
(Image embeds on old posts are gonna look bad but that’s OK, the information doesn’t tend to rely on exact image positioning.)

The big problem is of course comments. Self-hosted comment systems for static site generators exist. Hashover is interesting but fairly unmaintained (2 years since last commit). Staticman is likewise pretty fallow. I imagine I can figure out a way to pull over comments as part of the static files, I’m just worried about allowing ongoing commentary.

So what if I don’t? I’ve gotten a handful of comments which were really cool over many years of blogging. I mirror this blog to Dreamwidth anyhow, and my friends tend to comment there.

Avoiding the problem entirely seems like one good answer.

Another neat answer would be pushing all my posts to Mastodon and Bluesky, which would be a trivial exercise, and letting people comment there if they wanted. Not really user friendly and many of those cool comments were from non-tech savvy people; I think I’d lose some functionality. Still rather attractive from a distributed Web standpoint.

What if I also wrote some code to pull back replies to those posts and show them on the blog page? Substantial loss of control over spam, is what. Might be fun anyhow.