After 16 years on WordPress, I’ve finally moved the blog. You’re now looking at Hugo with the PaperMod theme, hosted on Azure Static Web Apps.

For those keeping score, this is actually the blog’s third home. I started writing on Windows Live Spaces back in 2009 and migrated to WordPress.com in 2010. Some of those earliest posts still have placeholder images where Live Spaces screenshots used to live – a reminder that platform migrations are nothing new around here.

Why Leave WordPress?

WordPress.com served me well for a long time, but I’ve been itching to make a change for years. I don’t need a CMS, a database, or PHP. I write markdown and paste in PowerShell – that’s about it. WordPress’ admin UI had become oppressive – or as my kids would say, extra.

As an infrastructure guy, I also wanted more control over the hosting. Static site generators produce plain HTML files that can be served from practically anywhere, with no runtime dependencies and no attack surface worth mentioning. That’s appealing.

Why Hugo on Azure Static Web Apps?

Hugo is fast, has no runtime dependencies, and the content is just markdown files in a Git repo. That means version control, branch-based previews, and CI/CD – things I already use every day.

Azure Static Web Apps made the most sense for hosting:

  • Free tier covers everything I need
  • GitHub Actions integration for automatic deployments on push to master
  • PR preview environments out of the box
  • Custom domain and TLS with zero configuration
  • Global CDN

The whole pipeline is: write a post, commit, push, done. No plugin updates, no database backups, no WordPress admin console.

The Migration

I used Claude Code to help with the migration – converting WordPress exports to Hugo-compatible markdown, reformatting frontmatter, cleaning up image references, and building out the site configuration. I ran agent teams to pull in all the old posts and scan for dead links. It saved me a ton of time on what would have otherwise been tedious, repetitive work.

All 131 posts made the trip, with the original URLs preserved so existing links still work.

I wrote more about how I use AI here.

No Comment Section

You may have noticed there’s no comment section. For now, that’s intentional – I’d rather keep things simple. If you want to reach me, I’m available through the social links on this site (GitHub, LinkedIn, X, etc.).