Almost exactly 11 years ago, my original Foraging for Clues site began, as a WordPress blog.
My plan was to complement my older site, wclang.net, with a site where I might be more political; the idea is that the older site would focus math and science, and the newer site would focus on religion, LGBT, and politics.
I also wanted to make the new site use modern technology for blogs, to keep my blog well-organized; I already knew that it was hard to keep a static, hand-edited html site organized. (Say if you want posts categorized into various topics, each accessed by separate menus, you need to update these every time you post.) I decided to try WordPress, which would also allow readers to post comments on my posts.
I soon learned what WordPress entails: You need a hosting service that will set up the needed database access to allow management of the site. I used SpireTech as the hosting service. They set me up, and they've always been very helpful.
So in July of 2011, I made my first post; it was fun playing with my shiny new toy.
Problems eventually arose. The first problem was the appearance of comment spam: Chinese-language posts advertising irrelevant things. There are tools to combat these, but they were infrequent enough to delete by hand. But this required regularly visiting the blog. Posts by readers were even less frequent, so eventually I turned off blog comments entirely (inviting readers to send comments directly to me; no one ever did).
A much more serious problem surfaced a couple of years ago: A hack of my WordPress blog. This appears to have been the result of my WordPress site not having been updated recently. The hacking incident was brought under control by SpireTech, and they set up my WordPress site to send me reminders to update the site when needed; no further troubles of this kind occurred.
But in all of this I realized WordPress had become a real liability to me. I seldom actually posted anything, and there is a significant danger involved. If I wanted a vanity site, it needed to be walk-away, passively safe. This meant it needed to be a static html-based, hand-edited site. So eventually I decided to revert to that kind of site.
This presented an interesting challenge: How to convert my WordPress site, with more than 100 posts, into a static site. The basic idea was to download an archive of the database and resources (photos) from the original site. I'd played with this before; I had already learned a smattering of SQL, and the rudiments of how to use a MySQL database in a programming language (I used R). I eventually managed to get the database to output very bare-bones pages; with some hand-editing, I had essentially the entire WordPress site. I've written a simple R script that should make it easier to update my blog when I wish to post something (to keep posts organized into various categories or topics).
So last week, I finally pulled the trigger: with a bit of help from SpireTech, I deleted everything associated with the WordPress site, and uploaded my static site, which you see here.