fub

If you’re Very Online like me, you will have heard about the feud between the guy who seems to be the sole owner of WordPress (both the commercial and the open source project…) has with a large hoster of WordPress instances. The whole issue is explained in this long-read, and it makes an excellent point that Matt has destroyed the trust in the whole WordPress project. And if there’s anything an open source project needs, it’s trust.

My blog uses WordPress, which I modified to have my own theme and things like user icons and moods (which I ported over from LiveJournal when I migrated).

For some time now, I have been thinking that I could also use a static site generator instead — I don’t need too many fancy stuff, I get almost no traffic on my blog itself anyway. And keeping WordPress up to date is a bit of a hassle, and if you don’t, you offer an attack surface to hackers…

But there are some interactive features that I value. I don’t get many comments on the blog (most interaction happens on DW), but I do want the option to receive comments and to react to them. And cross-posting to DW is also very important to me. And I am using the ActivityPub plugin from WordPress to federate my posts in the ‘fediverse’ so that people on Mastodon (or any other ActivityPub tool) can subscribe to my blog. And if they comment on the entry, that is actually captured as a comment, which is very cool I think.

All those interactive elements need something to process them (and to re-create the site to reflect those changes), and I don’t think there’s any solution that does this except WordPress.

Certainly something to research a bit more urgently, what with the recent problems in that corner.