I’ve been writing a blog since I’ve been in high-school. At first, it was fun to make websites and be part of the Internet (this was pre-Facebook). I was in love with my monochromatic colour palettes. The posts… well, they were the voice of my teenage brain — scattered and overly sassy.
I continued to write over the years, through multiple platform changes and resets to explore different topics. Unwittingly, they helped me significantly in being able to write better and tell stories to wider audiences. I am not a native english speaker and I did terribly in school when it came to languages as I moved from Sri Lanka to Singapore at 10y to study in english-medium.
About 12 years ago, I decided to restart my blog because I was learning a lot about technology. My posts revolved around my discoveries with frameworks like Ruby on Rails, iOS, and ember.js. Overtime, these posts looked more towards broader insight on tech and what it means to make things. While I deeply enjoy learning the details of technologies and building things, my professional growth led me to recognise that everything around the act of building is the hard part. It is easy to write code for something. It is so much harder to write code with others and for others. It is even harder to work in a place with more than 10 people working to make something together. What is “go to market” anyway? And why do we need to plan quarterly? Did your CFO dictate that?
When I reset my blog, I went with Squarespace. I loved the ease of the platform. People used to say that it is the “Apple of CMS”. Everything done for you, easy to use and modern. So it was. I even ended up with a website design that reflected my passion for writing. I am huge fan of daringfireball.net. It is purposefully minimal to let the content lead the way. It doesn’t look like a billboard, which many websites tend to be these days. Squarespace moved to a new layout system (Fluid Layout) but didn’t take their old customers with them. Overtime, the improvements leaned towards e-commerce. Understandable, because that is where the revenue growth comes from. My site got slower, despite being mostly text driven. It has felt a little aged lately.
At the same time, I started my job at GoDaddy, leading experience teams for WordPress, Hosting, Security and tools for Website Designers & Developers (WDD). It rekindled my love for more open systems. That is originally why I preferred having a blog. I wanted my own little place on the Internet, while being connected to everyone else. I didn’t want to just have a profile on Instagram. I liked the idea of owning my content. I still do. At GoDaddy, I got to meet with lots of WDDs and see the impact platforms like WordPress still has on the Internet. Sure, there is all kinds of turmoil around these open systems lately. However, at the heart of it, they are so beautiful and reflective of human achievement when we can put aside our differences to make something of so much value. I gave Ghost a try too, which is another open sourced writing platform competing with Substack. It felt a little restrictive to what I use my website for. So I decided to go back to WordPress. Let’s give it another shot. It would help me do more with my website. It would also help me dogfood the products I run at GoDaddy.
Migrations are hard
I was always a little afraid to take the plunge because of all the comments I read about WordPress and GoDaddy. That is changing quite rapidly. I watched my peers work really hard for 2 years to make huge strides to deliver much better things. There are some experience challenges, but that’s under my control… haha! Have a look at the performance numbers of our new platform. It is ridiculously fast. Can’t wait for this site to get migrated to this v2 platform!
Moving from Squarespace to WordPress is incredibly challenging. Squarespace lets you export posts to WordPress XML export format. That is where the help stops. I created a local docker environment and spent 3 weeks slowly migrating my content. I have about 120 posts from the past 12 years.
- I had to manually edit the HTML exports for posts to deleted sections that made posts either unusable (especially if there was a gallery) or break the Gutenberg editor at times. For many posts, I relied on regex to take out things that helped Gutenberg easily convert HTML to blocks effectively. It doesn’t like making assumptions like
<div><p>{content}</p></div>combinations are just paragraphs. - I used GL Import External Images to manually download images to WordPress assets library.
- Redirection plugin helped me map a lot of broken links.
I even managed to power through building a website from ground up using Gutenberg editor and 2024 theme, which I love for not trying to be a billboard in its look and feel. The editor has come a long way but it feels like no one tried to use it in anger while designing it. Basic workflows seem a little troublesome.
- Different areas of the editor seem to mix their responsibilities. There’s styles on the left; then there’s styles of the right. There’s components on the left; there’s components on the top.
- Workflow management sucks. If I am editing spacing, switching between elements will completely reset the property panels every, single, fkn, time. Editor gets in the way of me following through with an idea. It interrupts me to show itself.
- There is something about its component names to information architecture that seem to create a huge hump in trying to get good with it.
- It crashes once in a while…
Once you get it, it can be effective. Things like Query Loops are great ideas. Mix that with Block Visibility plugin to create some sweet, conditional layouts. I was really inspired by theverge.com on how they have quick posts. I wanted to do more of that on my site too, given I have no real social presence.
If you have some feedback on this site, please drop me a message. I’m all ears! It would help.
There are other challenges like having to take up Google Analytics again. It still sucks after all this time. plausible.io looks great but I’m not sure I’ll pay USD90/yr for that.
I love having a blog
I still love the idea of writing and storytelling. In a world where the Internet is quickly filling up with LLM crap or attention seeking social posts, original writing is still super important. I’m not trying to sell anything. I just want to make connections, discuss ideas openly, learn from one another and be part of the promise of the Internet.
I hope people who read my posts regularly find insightful ideas and learnings. As I continue to work for a large multi-national enterprise, my head is always trying to solve the problem of helping people who work with me make great things. There is so much that goes into creating things in a large community. Sooooo many challenges. I hope it is an interesting enough topic to keep people coming back.
I love making and I love learning and evolving my thoughts. Sharing that is the point of having this website. Get a RSS reader and subscribe :).
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