The move is finally done and sometime last week I switched my blog over to a statically-generated site powered by Zola. This is the first post I’ve written directly into Zola.

In a month’s time I’ll have been writing this blog for 22 years. 

For the first version I started by writing all the HTML markup by hand and uploading via FTP, then moved to Blogger (which took care of the templating and FTP for me, posting to the same location), then eventually migrated to WordPress when my Google account was disabled and finally I’m back writing posts in a desktop editor again, but this time I can write in Markdown and don’t have to worry about every single HTML element and attribute unless I choose to (hello !).

Plenty of stuff is still broken (mostly images) and anyone subscribed to my feed will have had duplicate posts (sorry! My WordPress feed used the post ID as its GUID rather than the post URL) but I’m glad to have pulled the trigger and can finally start playing around with a vastly simpler setup.

My first experiment on the new site is my stats page (inspired by Rob Knight’s own blog stats) which shows that I moved from software development to management in 2009, but I’m glad to have posted at least something every year since I started!

Hopefully this means I can do much more playing with what my site can do now that it's not weighed down by constant thoughts of whether I'm about to create a massive security hole in my wordpress install!