Static Shock: Why I Rebooted
It’s time to restart the ‘ole blog. Again.
But this time, I’m not just installing a new WordPress theme and calling it a day. The engine under the hood is fundamentally different. I’ve officially ditched the WordPress behemoth for something leaner, meaner, and significantly less likely to get hacked by a script kiddie looking for an outdated wp-login.php.
I’ve gone Static.
The Dynamic Burden
For years, I ran on dynamic CMS platforms. And for years, I realized I spent more time maintaining the tool than I did using it.
Every time I wanted to write a post, the mental friction was there:
- “Are my plugins up to date?”
- “Is the database backup running?”
- “Why is the TTFB (Time to First Byte) taking 800ms?”
Every page load was a complex dance: a request to a server, a PHP process spinning up, a query to a MySQL database, a template engine rendering HTML, and finally a response to the browser. It’s inefficient. It’s fragile. And frankly, for a personal blog where content changes maybe once a month, it’s massive overkill.
Enter Astro
This new site is built with Astro.
If you haven’t looked at the modern “Jamstack” ecosystem lately, Astro is essentially the golden child. It generates static HTML at build time.
- Speed: It’s just HTML files on a CDN. There is no database to query. The Time to First Byte is essentially “however long it takes light to travel from the nearest server edge node to you.”
- Security: You can’t hack a database that doesn’t exist. There is no admin panel to brute force.
- Simplicity: My “database” is now a folder of Markdown files. I write in VS Code, commit to GitHub, and Netlify automatically builds and deploys the site.
The Commute Workflow
The other driver for this change is logistical. The commute is back, which means more time on the Road. So don’t really want to spend most of my time maintaining a stack and optimizing it.. when I could just spend that time writing or tinkering.
It’s back to basics. Just text, files, and code. No plugins required.