From melabit to melabit: goodbye WordPress, hello Jekyll

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by the Microsoft Designer AI.

Eleven years ago, when I started writing in this personal space, I never imagined I would stick with WordPress.com for so long. WordPress.com is a convenient and reliable blogging platform, but it has always been ill-suited to my way of working. Over time, I learned to live with these limitations, but the idea of changing platforms never left my mind.

From the start, I had a clear idea of which alternative platform I wanted to use. A few years later, I revisited the available options and detailed the steps to transition in a long series of posts. Ultimately, though, I didn’t follow through, perhaps because I wasn’t fully convinced about the decision.

After all, leaving the comfort zone of a platform that has caused you zero problems over the years to embark on a new journey where you manage everything yourself is no small task.

A few months ago, however, Automattic, the company behind the open-source WordPress software and its related products, decided to share by default all content hosted on WordPress.com with “third parties.” Actually, this means sharing it with AI-powered text generators (think ChatGPT and similar tools) that are constantly hungry for new material to improve their training.¹ In that moment, my decision was made.

As if that weren’t enough, shortly after, Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’s founder, lost his temper, highlighting how, despite WordPress being the world’s most popular open-source content management system (CMS), the increasingly centralized and authoritarian control over its development threatens the platform’s open and transparent future.

And so, the die is cast! It took a lot of time and effort, but starting today, this little blog has its own home: melabit.com/posts/en, where I can experiment with much greater freedom than before. Let’s see how it goes.

The new site is still a work in progress. The basic structure is in place, but there will definitely be adjustments and improvements in the coming months. The very first thing to do is to expand the international section, which currently contains only a handful of posts, with several broken links or links to the original posts in italian. Additionally, I would like to implement a system for notifying users of new posts.

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to flag any issues or poorly functioning elements in the comments.

For technical details and the transition process, stay tuned for upcoming posts.

Rest assured that all old content and comments will remain available on melabit.wordpress.com. At least until Mullenweg kicks me out… 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

While it is true you can opt out of sharing your content—and I did—it’s also true that you must explicitly choose not to share your data, rather than the other way around, which would be more logical. And even then, there’s no guarantee that your content won’t be scraped anyway. ↩︎

Automattic on Melabit

From melabit to melabit: goodbye WordPress, hello Jekyll