For the past few months, I've been using Claude Code to migrate my websites away from Wordpress and into Jeckyll. And today I finished.

I've been wanting to do this for a long time, for a variety of reasons:

• Wordpress operates on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) and that is simply too many dependencies and moving parts that can break and need to be updated and maintained. I need simplicity and a static site system, such as Jeckyll, is what I need.
• For example, I ♥ E-Poetry was down for over a year because a no-longer-supported plugin (WPML) broke my database.
• I've disliked their shift to a block-based site building and writing interface, which they named "Gutenberg." It's unnecessarily complex for my needs and makes site development more laborious than it needs to be for my purposes.

That being said, I have been a proud and enthusiastic user of Wordpress for a solid 20 years. For about a decade of that, I would use the new templates they'd publish for every year in my main site and course websites, just to challenge myself to stay current with website trends and to see how to make it work. Yes. I'm THAT kind of a nerd. 😎

It gets nerdier: One thing I'm grateful for is the value of it as open source software that gets shared and expanded by the community. And that is something I intend to follow by working almost exclusively with open platforms like Jeckyll and HTML, though I'm able to do so through the assistance of my AI 🤖 helpers (Claude, GitHub CoPilot, and to a lesser extent, ChatGPT). Ironic? 😅 Yes and no. Using a corporate tool to produce something that doesn't depend on corporate tools to function (such as Jeckyll and HTML) makes me depend less on my AI tools to run and maintain the things I create, such as course websites, creative works, and resources like I ♥ E-Poetry and this site itself. Plus, I tried the migration tools: I didn't like the results and they required more technical expertise than I had (or wanted to develop). And because I don't have the personal or external funding to pay someone to do the migration, it wasn't going to happen without AI. I've been wanting to do this for at least 6-7 years and didn't have the means to make it happen.

And so I bid a fond farewell to Wordpress. Thanks for all the websites I hosted on your platform!

I'm sure our paths will cross again.