I'm torn between installing ActivityPub on my WordPress site an turning it into a static site with something like Simply Static. Thoughts?
@chris i guess it depends on your end goal. i am a huge fan of static sites, but i also don't know wordpress that well.
imo, static sites are very easy to maintain, and i personally like doing things from git repos and with markdown text. if that's the kind of experience you would prefer, then the static path can be very fulfilling.
one word of caution, when switching to a static site tool, you have to be careful about spending more time hacking on the tool than your posts ;)
@elmiko I was on Hugo for a long time and I'm an engineering manager for a team that is building a headless framework for WordPress so I understand static sites and won't be moving the site back to one of those tools (there's something to be said about WP for managing content).
I'm looking at a few tools to make my WP site fully static (I don't have comments/forms/etc) but if I do that ActivityPub won't do much on the site.
@chris good read, and i'm super curious about your transition from Go to WordPress.
@elmiko I've actually gone both ways. I've been in WP since ~2008 and picked up Go, ironically, when I came to WP Engine. I loved Go but the project was killed when we bought a company with a mature version of the product.
WP was fun for a long time but now the overemphasis on making it a tool to rival Wix and Squarespace means I'm glad I stepped out of writing code for it.
@chris oh, interesting. i'm not aware of how the wp static site stuff works, but i can totally empathize with using their tools to manage the content.
@elmiko Right on. At this point I have all my talks in my WP site and am building out a way to use it to replace GoodReads to track everything I've read. That would be nigh impossible with so many static tools.
@chris yeah, i could see spending a lot of time hacking on the tools to keep things orderly and sane.
@elmiko It's hard to explain all that on a network like this without sounding bad. Here's a post from when I moved back to WP from Hugo https://chriswiegman.com/2020/08/hello-wordpress-my-old-friend/