In November 2023, I moved this blog from a Jekyll site hosted on GitHub Pages to WordPress. I wanted to spend more time writing and less time maintaining the site's presentation.
This is a record of that decision. I later moved from WordPress to Astro, so the site you are reading now uses a different setup.
Why WordPress suited me then
With Jekyll, I wrote posts in files and rebuilt the site when they changed. That gave me control over the source, but adjusting the theme and adding features took time. WordPress provided a browser editor and an administrative interface for posts, media, themes, and comments. Those conveniences matched what I wanted at that stage.
The distinction is between the publishing workflows. Jekyll is a static-site generator; GitHub Pages is a hosting service. A static site can still run interactive JavaScript and connect to services. For example, giscus provides discussion-based comments. WordPress made several of these features easier for me to manage together, rather than making interaction possible for the first time.
There were tradeoffs. A WordPress installation depends on a runtime and database, and its software and extensions require maintenance. Whether the hosting provider handles that work depends on the service. My move was a practical choice for this blog, not a claim that WordPress is always faster, cheaper, or easier to scale than a static site.
The earlier site and template
The source of my previous site remains available at Deep0Thinking/Deep0Thinking.github.io. I also made 2nd-Minima, a template derived from Jekyll's Minima theme, with setup instructions in its repository.
Those projects record the earlier version of the blog and may be useful to someone exploring a similar setup. I chose WordPress because its editing workflow suited me in 2023; the later Astro move reflects a subsequent change in what I wanted to maintain myself.