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Don't start a WordPress blog and why I'm shutting mine down

avatar of @brianoflondon
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Dr Brian of London ✅
@brianoflondon
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5 min read

I'm going to remove WordPress from brianoflondon.me and freeze that site. Once I've published this post on Hive, I'll copy paste it into my WordPress site and take a snapshot of it. In a few days I'll shut it down.

You'll be able to find all future posts on Hive:

All the content on it is already on Hive and making sure it is up to date and working is just not worth the hassle. I haven't posted to it in almost a year.

When I first started using it, I really didn't know what it meant to run servers on the Internet. Only in the last two years of actively developing @podping and @v4vapp have I come to understand the responsibility of having root access on a public server on the Internet.

Things to like about WordPress

  • It isn't Facebook: you own your domain and the site and all your work
  • It is beguilingly easy to install and get working
  • You can do amazing things with it via plugins
  • I hosted podcasts through it
  • Censorship resistant (kind of)

Reasons to shut it down

  • The security of the core product
  • The security of every plugin
  • The security of every theme
  • The security of the database
  • The security of the server it is hosted on
  • Hosting costs
  • Censorship resistant
  • Estate planning

Things have changed. As I've come to appreciate the security implications of maintaining any software on the web, my WordPress blog has come to be a huge extra headache I don't need. The reality is I wasn't using it and Hive does everything I needed WordPress to do only better and without me worrying directly about it.

Hive does all this

I can write posts on Hive. I can put images on them. Via @threespeak I can host videos and my videos are also a podcast. Even when I used to podcast more regularly from my WordPress site I usually turned video into audio and uploaded that separately. It was a huge hassle and so much work I eventually stopped.

When I post to Hive I earn some Hive from the reward pool but that's the least important consideration. What is 100 times more important is that the system itself rewards the people running the infrastructure. Instead of me paying HostGator (who have become HORRIBLE) I know that the witnesses, API server operators, along with front ends like @peakd and @ecency are all financially incentivised to keep running the system and storing my blog posts!

If I stop paying HostGator, or renewing my domain name, my site disappears forever, just like the sites I first wrote on all the way back from 2006. Or like the work I put into Facebook and Twitter, both of which have deleted Brianoflondon.

Hive is a better product, and I understand how and why people keep it running. I'm inclined to believe Hive will still be running after I'm dead. That's not something I can ensure easily for my own WordPress site!

Censorship resistance

I've come to see this as a very big deal. And I'm not convinced that owning ones own domain name and self hosting a website is actually the best way to achieve censorship resistance. I've had hosting account shut down in the past. It is possible to have an entire domain name seized. Both of these would kill a self hosted site.

To do this to Hive is much more difficult. New front ends to the Hive back end can be deployed in minutes and on any domain name. Shutting down the actual back end of Hive would involve a lot of police in a lot of different countries and I dare say it is close to impossible at this point. If a significant number of the top 20 witnesses are taken offline, the lower witnesses will simply take over.

Hive has survived Justin Sun's money attack and taken huge steps to make the next money attack even less likely to damage us. In fact most of us would welcome any attempt to take us over and would probably take out some nice profits as the token pumped. Either way, it's very hard to see anyone taking over the chain.

My blogging history

My first blogging experience was probably early in 2006 on a site called friendsofmicronesia.com. That site died over a decade ago and I was just one of a group of people blogging there. Once someone fails to renew a domain name, everything is gone (unless it was scraped by Archive.org which that site was). That site was running on "Movable Type".

Also in that year I began podcasting on Shire Network News. Whilst I hold some of the domains for that, I was unable to keep everything on line and that faded after a complex site someone built for us in some web framework I can't even remember the name of fell behind on updates. That got infected with some kind of malware and I had to pull the plug.

After moving to Israel in 2009 I started contributing quite a bit of material to Israellycool.com which is still going strong thanks to the dedication of its founder Dave. But it was often just easier to post to Facebook. That site was on WordPress and for many years I did much of the more technical work.

In January 2019 I decided to get my own domain name and put up my own site. I chose WordPress because I was familiar with it and installing it on most hosting platforms can be done with one click. I had also been introduced to Steem/Hive in mid 2018 and joined there. This is the brianoflondon.me site which I'll be shutting down (actually I'll just freeze it) soon.

I can't link to my Facebook posts, those were erased by Facebook in Feb 2018 when Tommy Robinson was deleted. I had been on and off administering his Facebook page and that was enough to get my whole account and history wiped. I wasn't even just banned, the whole Brianoflondon account and Page was erased without warning.

Support Proposal 222 on PeakD Support Proposal 222 with Hivesigner Support Proposal 222 on Ecency