Starting Fresh

I stayed up very late last night trying to figure out how to migrate my old, outdated Statamic blog to micro.blog. I had let my Statamic install lapse and not updated it in years, and now it was exponentially harder to upgrade it to the new version, and therefore to anything m.b could understand. Statamic is a great product, but spending that kind of time on configuring everything to just put words out on the internet is not what I want to do anymore. Maybe it was worthwhile back in the days when I thought I wanted to be a front-end developer. I looked at all my installation notes from five years ago, amazed and horrified at how much effort it took to get things looking just right.

This morning, I was still trying to migrate it all, wrestling with regex to reformat Statamic v1 titles to v2 in hopes of exporting to WordPress format and then importing to m.b. My wise wife said, “Why don’t you just start fresh?” The hoarder in me resisted. “But my precious old posts!”, I thought. And then I realized, I don’t care! Let it go! I could spend that time writing new things, here!

I was also inspired to go all in on hosted m.b when I looked at the clean markup powering posts here vs. the dusty, bloated code behind what I had adapted from an old Statamic template, especially with Google Fonts and Google Analytics in the mix. M.b-hosted pages are a fraction of the size of what I was serving up. It’s like the ease of Squarespace but without all the extra JavaScript.