After 14 years of using wordpress and about 5 years of the same hosting provider, it is time to change. I have had a number of hosts over the years, switching usually because one will get bought by another who in turn is bought by another. My string of hosts has always been quite nice and the minimal support I have needed has been good. At first I think I was paying about 10$ a year, then increased to 33$. However the costs are rising, wordpress is slowing, and I should do both some simplifying and future proofing of the content here.
Wordpress has similarly always treated me well and I have enjoyed tweaking lots of little things to customize the site. I am sure no one uses the themes I have edited in years. I will miss my special rotating fonts, color coordinating the highlighting text color with the hyperlink color, and collapsible tag cloud. My homepage was also pretty nifty. But it is also fun to learn something new and become more lightweight. The beauty of computers is that everything is backed up, forever.
Thankfully the wayback machine is amazing.
There was a moment several years ago when the wordpress site was hacked by old plugins. That was a fun challenge to clean up and luckily nothing was lost.
I will transition all the photos and links to this one website and clean up formatting issues. Mataroa satisfies my above criteria and its simplicity is both a breath of fresh air and lowers the barrier for entry of posting. So much so that I will also look to transition my twitter links to here also. I think there will be a utility to having all online content in one place. It will be both a backup and a living document.