New Blog, Less Bull$#!^

You may have noticed I moved the store to Shopify about a month ago. Now I’ve also moved the blog. This is a purely static site rendered by Hugo, hosted on a server I manage. Let me know what you think.

tl;dr

Store is now on Shopify. Blog is now static and self-hosted. WordPress sucks. For now there’s no comment system (I’m open to suggestions) and some content hasn’t been moved yet - find it on the old blog for now.

If the trivia of administering this project doesn’t interest you feel free to stop reading now. The rest of this post is mostly me complaining.

Goodbye WooCommerce, Hello Shopify

WooCommerce wasn’t terrible, the store was reasonably configurable. Payments were handled securely by Stripe. Things mostly just worked until tax season came around.

I’d been collecting sales tax in California as required and tax rates were being calculated correctly by the built-in tools. All was well, until I needed to generate a report and actually file my return. Reports didn’t map to state tax jurisdictions and I found that sometimes orders were missing so the results were not accurate. I had to go through every order manually. Such fun!

Then my bank decided that my site needed to pass a PCI compliance scan (even though Stripe handles the payment entirely on their servers and I never have your payment information). WooCommerce makes this unpleasant and the host I was using has some issues. I genuinely don’t think I could have even gotten the old store to pass.

While I can’t enthusiastically endorse companies like Shopify they solved a simple problem here - my goal with the store is to make great stuff for my community and fund my hobby projects. Complying with payment processor requirements and compiling reports for tax authorities are necessary things but they are not the goal. Paying Shopify to handle that nonsense wasn’t a difficult decision.

Goodbye WordPress, Goodbye PHP, For Real This Time

Ya’ll know I prefer open source tech by now. A big part of my preference is having the ability to fix things myself. While WordPress seems to fulfill that requirement the codebase is a mess. It’s an ordeal to change anything and making changes in a way that allows safe updates is basically impossible. In practice I just didn’t change much, the effort and maintenance was always too much to justify whatever I was trying to change.

On top of that WordPress is just so dang slow. Achieving acceptable performance required multiple optimization plugins, caching layers, and lots of custom config. Getting to good performance would have required major surgery on WordPress itself, if such a thing is even possible without a complete rewrite.

A club member introduced me to the joys of static site generators. Having my entire site in plaintext that renders to HTML with the ability to script exactly how that rendering happens is absolutely amazing. This site is rendered by Hugo, I’ve built a lot of logic to optimize performance and make creating and editing content easy for myself. The whole setup is automatic, running on and deploying to a server I manage from the (virtualized) metal up.

The new site so fast and so easy to work in. I haven’t even added a caching layer yet.

Let me know how you like the changes and if you have any thoughts on a comment system.

73, AI6YM