Wordpress

Migration to Hugo

I have migrated this 14-year-old blog from a dynamic WordPress (based on WordPress) to a static website (based on Hugo). It was a pretty lengthy process even when I had scripts converting the WordPress XML export into markdown files.

Why a static site?

This gives a few advantages like:

• Must faster rendering as all the pages are generated well in advance & pushed to the server
• Better security (as the backend is not at all exposed unlike WordPress where backend admin portal was visible & behind an authenticated URL)
• Easy to distribute and put behind CDN
• Easy to type posts as now it’s just markdown

I haven’t finalised the hosting location for this newer site. For now, it’s on Google Cloud firebase but I am still just playing with the options. If I get some free time, I might just tweak my PowerDNS setup to start using GeoIP data for the request and serve the local server in a given country. That way I can host the website in India, Europe and US and let authoritative DNS steer the traffic. More on this later!

Some updates from personal life…

I have joined Fremont based IP backbone & colocation provider - Hurricane Electric and would be working on some cool things at AS6939. :)  

Updates on blog…

I have changed theme and entire look of blog and re-designed it with new plugins, more tweaking etc. As of now blog has more cleaner while theme which gives more space for posting, improved security with some ACLs, forced HTTPS to avoid telcos from injecting iframe in readers on 3G networks (which is very bad and worrying). Also, with use of bunch of plugins, now my I am hosting all static media content on AWS S3 to avoid local storage on server, it’s backup etc. Running it on AWS S3 with Geo replication + Cloudfront for CDN/efficient delivery made much more sense. Though sad that there’s no easy way for integration of Google Cloud storage with wordpress. S3 being more mature product makes it easier.