Marcin Juszkiewicz - wordpress

Good bye WordPress

2019-04-24T12:59:00+02:00

I had some kind of personal website since started using Internet in 1996. First it was set of hand edited Lynx bookmarks, then were experiments with wikis. Finally in 2005 I started using WordPress. And it was in use for those 14 years. Until now…

WordPress is nice platform but I got tired of it. More and more plugins and themes became demo versions of commercial products. Also amount of JavaScript and CSS added to website made it harder and harder to maintain. At some point I said myself that it is enough. And started looking for alternatives.

Pelican

Here came Pelican — static site generator written in Python. I had few attempts to switch to it and finally managed to find some time and sorted out all issues.

Someone my ask why Pelican? Why not Jekkyl, Gatsby, Hexo, Wintersmith or other. For me reason is simple — it is Python. Language which I already know. So in case of need I can read source code and know how to change it (already sent one change and it got merged).

Conversion

The good side is import from WordPress went nice. As I used Markdown most of posts required changes. Implementation in Pelican differs from old Markdown Extra + SmartyPants I had in my blog.

Images

Then came images. Copied whatever I had on previous website and removed all thumbnails. Then decided to go with 700px wide ones and to not link to original photos. Boring work as almost every image in every post needed change. Some entries got pictures removed (most of time due to their low resolution).

This also shown how my blog was changing through all those years. Over 10 years ago adding 300x300px picture into blog post was normal thing. Now such graphics got either removed or replaced with 700px wide one.

Some posts had galleries inserted instead of pictures. This took a bit more time as I was grabbing filenames from database to replace gallery with set of photos. And removed some of them during.

Look and feel

When I was collecting ideas for a new platform I had few ideas:

static generator
no JavaScript
minimal CSS
similar look to WordPress version

Pelican solved first point. Handling rest was harder.

I took a look at existing Pelican themes and tried several ones. Finally decided to make own one — like WordPress “Spacious” one.

As a base I used “Simple” theme. Typical template with header, content, sidebar and footer. Elements put in CSS grid for most of screens and once screen width goes under 70em layout switches to “flex”. This allowed for simple responsive web design. All in ~2.5KB of CSS (plus some code for webfonts).

Comments

As you may notice there is no way to comment posts anymore. Amount of comments was lower every year so I decided to not bother with them in new website. I could add Disqus for example but is it worth for just a few entries per year?

To Do

There are some things I need to take care of still. Page about my fridge magnets collection is missing, some entries may get some formatting changes or small contents edit. No big edits of old posts as they show how awful my English was in past (not that it got any better).

Yet another blog theme change

2018-05-28T17:54:00+02:00

During morning discussions I had to check something on my website and decided that it is a time to change theme. For nth time.

So I looked, checked several ones and then started editing ‘Spacious‘ one. Usual stuff — no categories, colours/fonts/styles changes. Went much faster than previous time.

But then I realised that I do not remember all previous ‘looks’ of my blog. Web archive to the rescue ;D

When I started on 1st April of 2005 I used some theme. Do not remember how it was called:

2005

About one year later I decided to change it. To Barthelme theme. Widgets arrived, clean view etc. At that time all my FOSS work was done in free time. As people were asking about donating money/hardware I had a special page about it. Anyone remembers Moneybookers?

2006

Year passed, another theme change. “Big Blue” this time. Something is wrong on styles as that white area in top left corner should have blue background. At that time I had my own one person company so website had information about available services. And blog got moved to “blog.haerwu.biz” domain instead of “hrw.one.pl” one.

2007

In 2009 I played with Atahualpa theme. Looks completely broken when loaded through web archive. Also changed site name to my full name instead of nickname. Also got rid of hard to pronounce properly name in favour of “marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl” which may not be easier to pronounce but several people already were able to call my last name properly.

2009

Same year I went for “Carrington blog” theme. Looks much better than previous one.

2010

2012 happened. And change to Twenty Twelve happened too. End of the world did not happened.

2012

Some restyling was done later. And subtitle went from OpenEmbedded to ARM/AArch64 stuff.

2015

Three years with one theme. Quite long time. So another change: Twenty Sixteen. This was supposed to look properly on mobile devices (and did).

2016

And now new theme: Spacious. For another few years?

2018

One website and so many changes… Still keeping simplicity, no plans for adding images to every post etc.

Fresh WordPress

2017-02-18T23:18:00+01:00

I am running my blog for nearly 12 years now. And through all those years it was running same WordPress installation. Until today.

At beginning it was WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) as I used it to run both my blog and website for my consulting company. It was fun. Some WP plugins were working with WPMU, some not. Then WordPress developers decided to merge both projects into one. And it was good.

When I started blogging I did not used categories for posts but tagged them instead. Months turned into years and at some moment WP got tags natively so UltimateTagWarrior plugin went to trash (after converting to WP tags).

I was changing blog theme every few years to bring some change. The other thing which was changing was http server - from Apache to Lighttpd and now it is powered by Nginx + PHP-fpm.

Company website got trashed in meantime. Our wedding page appeared for few months as other blog. There was map with all required placemarks for church, flower shops, family homes, hotels and other useful services. Wish list for those who wanted to know what to give was also present. With “sepulki” as last entry — no one knows what “sepulki” are as they appear in one of Lem’s books. The only known thing is that you need to be married to be allowed to use them. Some guests had interesting ideas for it ;D

At some moment I had a page with Mira’s photos. Page required registration and logging. Long time removed.

And then Ania (my wife) requested page for her psychotherapist services. So she got it.

At some moment I was running three different domains using one WP installation. It was mess. Terrible mess. At some moment there were authorization issues so I had to change something…

So now I have fresh WordPress installed. Websites partially restored from backup to not keep settings/tables from long time not used plugins. Hope it will work fine ;D

New theme

2015-12-14T16:56:00+01:00

From time to time I feel that it is a good moment to change view of my blog — this time to modified “Twenty Sixteen” theme.

What got modified? As usual categories got removed, switched fonts to serif ones, some paddings edited and text got justified. Just to fit better to my taste.

Also got rid of several plugins I used. No more comments from Google+ - want to comment, then standard Wordpress form is present. Also moved to “Autoptimize” plugin for minifying CSS and Javascript files.

This theme has to stay for next few years ;D

Switched blog theme again

2012-09-05T14:27:00+02:00

Long, long time passed since last time I changed theme on my blog. What you see this time is Twenty Twelve from Wordpress team. Maybe it is not yet finished but it works better than Carrington which I had before. Not to mention that previous theme was not updated for long time (I did few updates by hand with code from their Subversion repository but it was not comfortable).

This theme looks good on desktop, phone, tablet and I will use it for probably quite long time. Will update it to released version once there will be such one ;D

Yet another theme change

2009-10-08T15:48:00+02:00

WordPress has one nice thing — themes support. Effect is that I change theme from time to time.

I always preferred simple themes not overloaded with graphics. Like Barthelme, plaintxtBlog or BigBlue.

In most situations I modded theme for my own style each time. That made upgrading to newer versions harder but was worth most of time. What was changed? Removal of categories (which I do not use), replacing them with tags, removing not useful elements of page, changing CSS etc. Those changes which could be useful for others I usually sent back to authors.

Before this theme I used Atahualpa but it was overloaded with options and still used tables for layout which I find too deprecated. And lot of extra code was generated and inserted into page each time. And I had lot of problems when tried to upgrade to newest version.

Now my blog uses Carrington Blog theme and as usual some changes were made to it. I like that theme and it will stay like that for some time (until next change).

WordPress plugins which I use on this blog

2009-03-04T18:23:00+01:00

Cliff Brake asked me which plugins I use on my blog for spam protection. I decided to write about all plugins which I use here.

Widgets

First part would be widgets which are used in sidebars:

Configurable Tag Cloud — I had my own one but needed more functionality
Feedburner Widget — tells how many readers my blog has via RSS readers. Not always sensible value ;)
Popularity Contest Widget — lists popular posts
Hrw Meta widget — no links to RSS, checks for WP/WPMU and give proper link

Spam related

I used Spam Karma 2 before but it is not maintained anymore. Now I use simpler ones:

Yawasp - Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin — mangle names of comment fields and adds some automatically changed one to protect me from spambots
ClearSpam — removes spam comments from database

Statistics

“Do not believe in statistics which you did not faked” or what to use to track visitors:

Google Analytics for WordPress — real monster
WordPress.com Stats — simple one but available in dashboard

Content related

Markdown Extra — this should be part of WP core — no need to remember HTML as simpler markup is available
Popularity Contest — gives informations which posts are still the most read one. Great when widget is used.
SRG Clean Archives — powers Archives page. Very heavily modified by me with most of features removed.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin — adds link to “probably related” posts at the end of each post
Recommended Tags — recommends tags in post editor. Modified by me — will release my version one day.
Tag Managing Thing — another rarely used plugin which helps to manage tags
Scissors — simple editing of uploaded images
Slimbox Plugin — nice popups of images

Other

Contact Form — I use it on Contact page
OpenID — adds possibility to use blog as OpenID server (also supports OpenID login to blog)
WP Super Cache — just in case of Digg effect

Theme

OK, theme is not a plugin :D I use plaintxtblog by Scott with few modifications.

Dissapearing comments

2008-09-15T16:05:00+02:00

As some of you probably noticed from time to time comment which you enter is not visible on site. This does not always mean that it got into moderation queue — sometimes it is somewhere but I do not have idea where and why.

Maybe it is because of software setup which I use: WordPress MultiUser + SpamKarma, maybe it has other reason. This does not change a fact that sometimes some comments just do not land.

And the funny part is that I am getting e-mails with those comments contents without problems…