Back To Basics

I wasted several hours yesterday trying to work out what was causing MarsEdit to return error messages whenever I tried to post to this blog or refresh the list of posts and pages.

I’m still no nearer to finding the cause today, and to be frank I’m tired of the aggravation this has caused me.

So I’ve decided that, like the title of this blog post says, I’m resetting this blog’s configuration back to the minimum I need to keep it safe and secure. I’m typing this in the Gutenberg editor inside WordPress, which (shocker) isn’t so bad.

I’ve also decided to ditch all of the IndieWeb stuff that I’d plugged into this site. While it was nice to have responses from folks over on Micro.blog show up here, I’ve decided that I can trade that for the loss of baggage attached to my WordPress installation.

I did give some thought to the idea of stuffing WordPress altogether, and moving to one of these fancy static site generators that seem to be the new hotness. However, my impression is that it would require a lot of gruntwork to setup my computer, and while I have a lot of free time right now, I can think of better ways to occupy it which won’t involve nearly as much potential swearing.

I’m in two minds about reconnecting this blog to WordPress.com — while there are some benefits, truthfully the only part that would I really need is the Akismet spam protection. (Disappointingly, my blog still gets a trickle of spam, and I guess this is the equivalent of background radiation on the Internet.)

One thing that I am contemplating doing, at some point, is learning how to create a customised theme for this blog and perhaps improve its performance. I think that’s a much more achievable goal for me, given my previous web design / development experience.