Goodbye WordPress, hello SimpleBlog

Many years ago, I started a blog using dasBlog, a very nice .NET-based, open source blogging platform, written by Scott Hanselman. No-one read it of course, but as I've mentioned here more than once, I use my blog as a dumping ground for things I've discovered and know I will forget. If my posts help anyone else, well, that's a nice bonus 😎.

Around 16 years ago (judging by the date of my first post), I made a mistake, moved to WordPress. Well, everyone else seemed to be using it, so it seemed like a good idea at the time!

There is a lovely, and certainly untrue story, that during the 1982 conflict around the Falkland Islands, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy pilots were flying low-level sorties around the islands. The Falklands are home to many penguins, and, according to the legend, as the pilots flew up the beach, 10,000 penguins would turn their heads from one side to the other, watching the plane as it flew past.

When the pilots flew the other way along the beach, 10,000 penguins would turn their heads back again, watching the plane as it flew past.

One of the pilots flew his plane out to sea, turned it around, and flew back, directly at the beach.

10,000 penguins lifted their heads as the plane flew overhead, and then gently fell backwards!

The moral of the story is, if 10,000 people do a stupid thing, it's still a stupid thing!

Now I'm not saying that using WordPress proves you are stupid, but I don't think it was a good move. Although I stuck with it for all these years, I never liked it. I found it slow, bloated and far too messy for my liking.

We're going to be moving our hosting soon, and the person who maintains our server decided he is not going to install MySql or PHP on the new server. That left me with the question of what to do with my trusty old blog.

I decided to explore the possibility of a blog without a database. Once a post is made, it rarely changes, so why not save it as a static HTML file? That way I could have a Blazor site (because I just lurve Blazor, and wouldn't think of using anything else 😍) that statically rendered the HTML files.

However, being lazy and curious, I decided to see how far I could get building this with AI. Whilst I regularly use Copilot (with Claude Sonnet) for coding tasks, my experience of getting it to build a full app has been disappointing so far. However, I decided to give it a go.

I started by describing my idea to Claude and asking for feedback. Within an hour or so, we had worked out a pretty detailed specification, which I copied into a github issue, and assigned it to Copilot.

Its first go was pretty impressive, although it only did about half of the job. After another prompt, it finished it off. We did a few more iterations, as I discovered things I'd missed, or not described accurately, but it only took an afternoon to produce a fully working blog.

Next job was to import the posts, media and comments from my WordPress blog. That was a bit more complex, but still only took a few hours.

Top it off with a theme switcher and a few other extras, and here we are. This is my first post with the new blog. Super fast, and no WordPress!