Hello from a new server

The most recent years this site was run of a Digital Ocean Droplet. A Droplet is their fancy name for a virtual private server (VPS) on shared hardware, but not anymore.

Generally I’ve been quite happy on Digital Ocean and they’ve provided a stable service through years. There was how ever a few things which caused an opportunity to move away.

• I was running on a 32bit OS, and needed to reinstall the Droplet to move to a current OS.
• They products and features offered by Digital Ocean seems to be more Corporate than my needs.
• While the price of 7.5 Euro a month for a server doesn’t seem that expensive, it’s been steady for years without any upgrades to CPU or memory.

Sourcing a few recommendations, welcome to the new server - again a VPS - hosted by Hetzner in Germany.

Switching to Hugo caused a major change in the workflow behind the site.

Wordpress comes with a full-featured backend which allows you to manage basically your entire website (if it’s Wordpress powered), but Hugo don’t. There’s no-backend admin site nor an webeditor to create and manage your posts. It doesn’t bother me. It’s a completely different workflow and I’m starting with a rough minimum flow initially untill I get a bit more expirence running Hugo.

Going from one CMS to another can be huge challenge - especially as I wanted the various pieces I’ve managed to bring along from the past 20 years along (content from the first years of the site is sadly lost over time).

Getting content out of Wordpress

Getting content out of Wordpress is quite easy. It has a built-in export function and while it took some time, resulting in a large zip file. As Wordpress powers huge parts of the Internet, the export format is well-understood and documented so it only to a little time to find a tool which could do a conversion from the Wordpress export to Marked which is what the Hugo CMS wants.

This site has been running for 20+ years. Most of the years I’ve been using wordpress to post occasionally and have fun messing around.

Wordpress have been a moving target and gained more features through the years. Far more than I ever needed, and to keep simple I’ve decided to move to a simpler setup using the HugoCMS.

Getting to here

One of the benefits of Hugo is, that it’s easy to have it running locally and rapidly let you see changes and update you make to hugo configuraion, themes and content - and I’ve even used it across Linux and MacOS during migation.

I’ve switched nameservers for all my domains yesterday. During the past many years I’ve been free-riding on GratisDNS and enjoying their free DNS service (and luckily never needed support in their forums).

Yesterday I switched to Cloudflare and I’m using them for DNS for this (and other domains). I don’t have any particular requirements, and the switch was mostly easy and automated to the extent possible. Two domains went smooth, but the last my mahler.io domain went a stray a few hours during the switch.