Goodbye WordPress, Hello JAMstack!

I've been running my "personal brand" blog at 47hats since 2005 on one platform or another; for the past decade in WordPress.

I hate WordPress.

I'm convinced that all that never-ending messing with plugins, theme configurations, broken wp installs and the like took all the joy out of blogging for the first generation of bloggers.

And performance sucked:

But the imperatives for blogging haven't gone away: we still need a public way to connect to people, to show what we are (mostly) good at, to register as a "thought leader" in whatever we are passionate about.

Getting on the JAMstack movement

I've seen a lot of various movements come and mostly go in the tech industry: Windows OS (don't judge) at one time was revolutionary. Then, for me, there was Ruby on Rails. Then .js everything, React, Vue, and on and on. The difference between a tool (like webpack, gulp, etc.) and a movement is two things: people and affordances.

About a year ago after listening to Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski raving about netlify, I decided to give it a try with a demo Jekyll example blog. I sat there gobsmacked for 10 minutes because I had never, ever, seen such an easy deploy resulting in such a performant site.

I started noticing how many interesting people were moving over to the JAMstack and how many startups were springing up in the space: this is a movement, not a shiny new object.

Making the switch, get to the punchline

So last month I decided instead of hosting my WP site in WordPress on Siteground (the best of the WP hosts, IMO) for another year, I'd see if I could stand up my blog in Vue on Netlify.

I rapidly descended down several rabbit holes: first Nuxt, then VuePress, then Vuetify, then gridsome. Gridsome is an awesome framework for someone who needs a home for their blog, with a few pages and wants to get it done now.

Last night I threw the [dns] switch, and today my site looks like this:

.

My JAMstack journey is in its early days; HubSpot and Rails still pay the bills. But there are some amazing opportunities to create value that's performant, fun to build and looks good everywhere: I hope to find my place in the JAMstack Revolution.

Comments

[P. Marian]

How did you transfer the data from wordpress?

[Bob Walsh]

I'll be writing up a post here and at 47hats later this week!

[Nebojsa Radakovic]

that I'd love to see. great work 👍

[Bob Walsh]

Its up both here and at 47hats.com - let me know what you think!