What better way to kick off a new blog than by documenting the migration to it.

Previously this blog was created using GoHugo. I had a repository within github where I’d write some posts using markdown, hit commit and a github action would pick up the changes, build a container, push it to dockerhub and send a signal to my kubernetes deployment at home to deploy it. I’m not going to lie, the setup was pretty slick and it worked well. The problem with it is that it wasn’t very impulsive. I couldn’t simply throw out some thoughts as it required me to fire up my IDE and do the whole development thing just to put a few words on a website. Over time I grew to resent it and eventually stopped posting. Hopefully, good old reliable WordPress will fix that.

So I started with needing a WordPress blog, simple I thought but being the cheapskate I am, I didn’t want to pay the ~£15 a month to get a professionally hosted instance when I can do it myself for a fraction of the cost.

The setup is simple. It’s a single droplet hosted within digital ocean running Debian, nginx, mariadb and php. The setup is automated using terraform and ansible up to the point of deploying WordPress. I did this step manually since WordPress has a self updater, I didn’t want the automation and WordPress tripping over each other. I’ll post the automation on github once i’ve tidied it up a bit. But interesting little factoid. This is the first project i’ve really dug in to AI for and it was an experience. I was able to quickly bootstrap a repo creating the basis of what I wanted to create and it worked; except it all fell apart very quickly providing hallucinated features or not updating the code to work how I wanted it to. It was about the time that I spent longer trying to explain what the issue was than just doing it myself; that I took what it had produced and continued manually. This honestly saved a lot of time. It took probably about an hour to get a reasonable basis and probably another hour of tweaks. It was cool when it was doing what I wanted but since there wasn’t anything new that couldn’t already be found and copied from the docs I won’t be signing up for a paid account just yet.

With all the setup bits done I copied over the WordPress zip, extracted it, fixed up the permissions, ran the wordpress setup and took it for a whirl.

That looks broken I think as I reach for the inspector. Nope it all loaded OK so where’s the rest of it? It turns out this is how the 2025 theme looks now. Its all configurable with blocks it would seem to they can diverge from previous releases that come with a more complete theme out of the box. This is the first time I’ve used WordPress since about 2015 and it would seem its come a long way. After acquainting myself with how everything hangs together I was able to get something that resembled a blog thrown together – its not perfect but it’ll do as a starting point. I quite like the WYSIWYG approach to construction allowing some degree of flexibility without having to resort to code. As someone who is allergic to frontend the more it can be abstracted away from me the better.