it all returns to markdown

it all returns to plaintext

it all comes
marking me down,
marking me down,
marking me down

it all returns to plaintext

matt just keeps
letting me down,
letting me down,
letting me down

- KOMM, SUSSER MARKDOWN, Arianne Schreiber

in conclusion: wordpress sucks

a few years ago, i said i was going to try out Wordpress "after being a static site nerd for a decade". i'm back to report with devastating news that we probably all already knew: Wordpress sucks.

there's a lot of reasons to not like Wordpress, in whichever flavor you'd like. do you dislike the fact that the creator of Wordpress allegedly uses tactics akin to blackmail against his competitors?^[1] do you dislike that Wordpress is pushing pro-AI features^[2] that will DEFINITELY NOT create a sea of rancid, vacuous nothingburger malware plugins to install in your website?^[3] or do you dislike how the creator of Wordpress is allegedly running his own project into the ground by being a tyrant?^[4] or are you still scratching your head at how openclaw could be a "spiritual successor" to wordpress in any way, shape, or form? frankly, i just hope Matt doesn't pull a Microsoft and tell me later this was all "just for entertainment".^[5] "just a prank, bro!"

me, however, i dislike the platform for more than just ideological reasons. the product itself sucks. i used Wordpress for a year and wasn't happy with it. i paid for the "Premium" plan for a year, which they say is $8 but is more like $9 after taxes and other fees. 🙄

from my experience: if you look at Wordpress' wysiwyg^[6] editor the wrong way, you may accidentally summon the demon of Microsoft Word 2013 back from the software graves in Redmond, Washington. it will be pissed that it's working for Matt Mullenweg (in PHP?!) and be upset that you dared insert an image without consulting the documentation first or just writing it yourself by hand.^[7] instead of being at the level you wanted it in your document, it has happily nestled itself in a cavern of <div>s. needless to say, it was not sparking joy. i found myself needing to write in plain text editors i was familiar with or that were made for writing like iA Writer or Typora. then, i had to coax that Markdown file back into something that Wordpress could understand. it's a layer of friction i got tired of.

despite my griping, Wordpress is... working(?) for large corporations, which a sign of maturity in the software development world.^[8] Vox Media and a ton of other big journalist groups are using it,^[9] so it clearly has commercial enterprise viability online outside of a subscription service for bloggers. this means that either people are tolerating it with its quirks for usage with a large group of non-technical users or are genuinely enjoying it at scale. i'm not sure which one is truer. i get an inkling it's more the former, though, since 404 Media straight up funded the development of Ghost to add more features for everyone like RSS,^[10] which is a really empowering way of letting subscribers read 404 Media posts how they wish. i've heard good things about Ghost, and it even has Markdown support! but every time i turn to set up the app, i get a feeling that i really don't need a CMS behind me to get my content out there.

after getting frustrated with wordpress i decided to check medium to see if it had gotten better. to my dismay (and complete lack of surprise), it had gotten worse. medium has become very closed off since i started writing on there nearly a decade ago.^[11] i have to log in just to read free articles at times, which is really annoying. moreover, there's a lovely trend where you'll want to read an article and then you realize the author has placed it behind Medium+ or Pro or whatever the offering is called. i am not signing up for Medium+.^[12] the next best alternative to Medium is Substack, but i don't want to be at the nazi bar. there's nazis there.^[13]

honestly, closed-source privately-owned blogging services eventually enshittify due to a litany of reasons, but the main reason is trying to make the platform profitable. there's always going to be a conflict of interest in a blog hoster:

1. provide readers with a good experience to read the posts you want to post
   and
2. make money so the blog can continue to be hosted

you are either eating the cost of hosting or your blog platform is. this is why ad-driven blogging got so popular; the blog platform is technically eating the cost but are actually making BANK off of your posts. most likely, the platform is just making money off of you since the amount of compute needed to host your blog is negligible with what is being charged to your card. you're really paying for the technical expertise of having a web server set up for you.^[14]

so, big companies hosting my words are out the window. i'm tired of having to migrate every few years to something new because the terms of service change, it becomes more expensive, or the service wants me to cough up money to give people my articles for free.

we don't need no federation

technically, Wordpress is a federated platform. you can shove your Wordpress blog onto the Fediverse if you oh-so-desire. so, i started to look at federated cms alternatives geared towards writing. right now, there's writefreely^[15] but their main instance is closed to free users for the time being and i'm not really willing to look for another instance; at that point i'd rather just host my own. i'd have to shell out $9 to join the main instance^[16] or start hosting some software again, which is the same issue i have with Ghost. i'd be stuck with self-hosting a type of CMS again, which i don't want.

however, if i'm being honest: i don't think federation is worth it for blogs. when most ActivityPub software interacts with something that is decidedly not microblogging (like mastodon), the ux doesn't change to fit that content: it just looks like another user profile and their posts, which is not ideal. this happens with any kind of federated software that isn't meant to be used for microblogging, like Lemmy, but it is especially bad with viewing writefreely posts through Mastodon.

if you access any writefreely/write.as blog through Mastodon, the posts always look like microblogging posts and not as honest-to-god blog posts as they were intended to be viewed. this always feels clunky to me. i would rather some sort of webview overlay open up to see the post instead of having to click through the weird profile ux, but i don't think ActivityPub implementations are there yet. maybe someday! but not today.

so, the need for federation really doesn't speak to me. maybe in the future i will revisit this post and go "oh shit i really should have been federating since 2026" but those thoughts will not appear for at least a decade or two so i'll probably be fine.

we just need marked down posts

Markdown is a markup language where you type something and that becomes HTML. it's what i turn to when wanting to write something with more than a .txt file. there's no part in between where some web framework is injected and i have to parse a layer of <div>s just to get to the text.

the portability of Markdown is what keeps me using it. the original version of this article was written in Logseq. i'm writing the bulk of this blog post in Obsidian. i will then will copy the contents of this post directly to my preferred code text editor and render it in a static site generator of my choice to see the plain text become my website. currently, that choice is Eleventy. before, it was Hugo. before that, it was Jekyll. but because i used Markdown files the whole way, swapping to a new framework, editor, backup methodology, or whatever is very easy since markdown is framework-agnostic. it's just plain text files.^[17] it's a magical feeling.

if you learn write Markdown consistently, you can have mostly Semantic HTML to inject into any <article> with very little hassle to the user writing the text. i find this allows me more control. i'm trying to stick to writing CommonMark spec compliant Markdown to ensure i can pick up my work and put it wherever i want. and, if i ever need any HTML that isn't part of markdown, i can just put it in the file directly. it's not perfect, but it's the best i've got for now that keeps me from writing repetitive HTML.

writing all of your HTML by hand is a nice learning tool to start out! but i find i genuinely cannot sit down and write every single page for every single blog post i plan to make. i don't have a lot of time to write in the first place, and i need to be able to minimize the friction between writing text and publishing it. i need some convenience in my life and can't reinvent the wheel this far into the game.

wordpress and the BDFL-like way it was run before becoming more DFL^[18] is a sign of the times. Wordpress is enshittifying, has enshittified, and will continue to enshittify as long as Matt is at the helm. that really sucks, because Wordpress is the backbone of a lot of the blogosphere online. however, technologies and software that repackage basic concepts like just serving plain HTML to the browser are becoming more and more popular every day.

for now, i've settled on a static site generator, eleventy. for this blog. i like hugo, but it's a little terse and the documentation leaves something to be desired. hugo was what i initially reached for when making static sites, but it sometimes works against me when trying to make a website in a way i won't go into in this article.^[19] static site generators to be my preferred way of publishing on the internet, and a lot of people seem to agree this makes sense for low-stakes blogging.

if you take anything away from this article, reader, know that the blogging future is not Wordpress. it could be better CMSes like Ghost, federated alternatives, static site generators, or something else. who knows, maybe we'll develop some browser plugin or have markdown be immediately legible as HTML or some weird new technology the future will hold. maybe one of these days i'm just going to serve raw markdown files and you'll probably be happy reading them!^[20]

but, trust me: anything is better than Wordpress.