Over the years this blog has gone through various technologies. I started with b2, then, following the logical path, moved on to its derivative, WordPress. I stayed there for over 20 years, the last 11 without publishing anything. Life — that thing that keeps you busy and completely shifts your focus.
This summer, after getting tired of occasionally having to spend time updating WordPress to patch security holes, I took advantage of my vacation to switch to a static site generator. No more databases, no more PHP: pure HTML generated from Markdown.
I’m writing this first post in my favorite editor, Marktext, and using Hugo to publish it.
Using a WordPress plugin, I generated Markdown versions of all the posts. The comments were lost, but I don’t think they hold much value after 10, 15, or 20 years. I took the opportunity to fix some broken links by replacing them with Wayback Machine links, and I’ll share a hint I learned:
Web page links work fine, but if you want to link to an image, a CSS file, or something similar, your browser will likely block it with an ORB (Opaque Response Blocking) message. To avoid this, Wayback Machine provides an addition to the URLs:
- For images: https://web.archive.org/web/[timestamp]im_/[image-url]
- For raw content: https://web.archive.org/web/[timestamp]id_/[original-url]
There are other suffixes for CSS (cs_) and JavaScript (js_)