Simple Living in Suffolk is no more

WordPress is great as a blogging platform, but this Christmas period is the third time my self-hosted WP has been hacked over the odd ten years of running this, and I’ve had enough.

I didn’t give up work to spend my days trawling through loads of computer files to look for exactly where the particular cyber scum had crapped on. It was time to give up the fight against the tosspots of this world. People are always more tossy than I can be clever.

So the solution is that WordPress can have the problem. I even considered paying for it for a moment, but then decided against it. I’m not so vain that I need to have my own domain name at this stage, because I don’t monetize the site. If Monevator can’t work out how to do that then I sure as hell aren’t smart enough 😉

But I do learn and appreciate the dialogue. Mrs Ermine even talked me out pulling the plug by offering to pay the WordPress rent. So I moved the content and comments to WordPress.com.

The ermine didn’t get where he is today by paying for things he can’t touch. I have no mobile phone subscription, I don’t rent anything if I can avoid it and one of the first wins over spending I got on deciding to leave work was to shoot all subscriptions and then take it from there. I’m not going to break that habit yet, but the WordPress corporation can have the work of keeping the Mujahidin Cyber Army out of their sprawling and messy code. And I don’t ever want to see PHP again.

Oddly enough I can still make websites using old-skool passive html – using Jekyll is a good way to dynamically process pages and create a great website on something historical that doesn’t change much. It would even do a very good attempt at blogging. But the tragedy of all static html is that there is no comment system, for that you need the database, and that’s where it all starts to go pear shaped. Since interacting with commenters is the whole point of blogging IMO jekyll doesn’t work for blogging.

It’s also part of the wider shift I mentioned last time. I want to get away from the nitty-gritty of making particular things happen – it is the creativity of writing that I am after rather than making computers do something. I want to spend time in places like this

Brean Down, Somerset

than behind a screen. I took time out from battling the Cyber Army to go out and listen to the tawny owls hooting in the garden, because it is good to know what matters in this world more. So I want to use my time well, and in this quiet time of the year it is important to think about what I will not do as well as what I will do. Because every yes to the owls and the trees with the moon is a no to something else like

and I’ve seen too much of the latter 😉

It’s not that clear to me how the commenting system on here works in comparison to the self-hosted variation, and I suspect most people read this through RSS feeds or email subscription from the old site which will be lost, although are possible here – see links on RHS.

On the upside, it is apparently possible to read the mustelid meanderings on a mobile phone, and the interface does look cleaner to me. Then there is the separation of form from function intimated in Resilient Web Design, a promise that was whispered to us from the first

<h1>

and

<p>

tags in 1992 before all those guys from the print industry with their Mac computers and Dreamweaver snatched it away from us when they  smashed content and presentation together with the

<font>

and

<color>

tags.