I've recently taken the plunge and installed Wordpress for someone to share their stories. I won't say who it is, to protect her anonymity, but if she's reading this, she'll know I'm referring to her :)

It made me realise just how long I've avoided Wordpress, as I've always felt it was a bit too heavyweight.

Back in 1995/6, Edinburgh University allowed the students to run a web server called TARDIS. It was a fun service that let us share files and make websites. It was my first website, on tardis.cs.ed.ac.uk, and there was no such thing as "Content Management Systems" back then. The closest were tools like Frontpage, but were a far cry from modern Content Management Systems (CMSses). I ended up making my own fixed site with HTML rather than suffer Fusion or Frontpage.

A few years later, while I was doing my PhD, CMS systems started to become 'a thing' as people tired of writing HTML and wanted to move to a more flexible Blog-like format. Most of the good ones cost real money, so I wrote my own CMS in Java back in the early 2000s and used it to host some pages on an old site called miezekatze.com. It was my first self-hosted domain, and although my own markup language was pretty tight (if I do say so myself), it wasn't as good as Markdown, and generating the site took a little while for the Java interpreter to trawl all the files... so it was more like "Compiling" the website from "source".

If you're wondering why miezekatze, it was because I was friends with a group of German girls, one of whom had some cats, and we all agreed that "miezekatze" (which I think literally translates as 'little kitty') sounded really cute. I hosted a small development blog, and a bunch of Java (and Javascript) games on it. But it was just a play site, really, and I gave it up after a couple of years.

Towards the back of "the naughties", I played with a CMS called "Zope" that treated everything as an "Object"... Everything was an object in a tree, and searching for things was done via a kind of object inheritence... higher-level things could format lower level things... It was all very confusing and, although novel, broke my brain while I was trying to figure it out. I'm still aghast that Zope didn't die, and instead became Plone! which is STILL GOING. I recognise that the object idea was novel, but it was so off-the wall. I hacked away with it for a few months, but gave up.

Fast forward to about 2011, and I got myself a NAS that had hosting options... I could choose from Drupal, Joomla! and a couple of others. I played with them all, and eventually settled on Joomla! for my wedding's website. I liked it, but it was a bit janky in places, and I never quite got out of it what I wanted. Technically, though, it was pretty good, so I looked to hosting my own Joomla! instance somewhere else than the NAS that was also hosting my private files.

I made a website called palaeomoo.com. Why Palaeomoo? My other half stuff does with dead bovid species, hence palaeo (old/stone/fossil) moo (cows). It was also the name of her laptop, so it was a kind of in-joke. The wedding was on the subdomain wedding.palaeomoo.com. I can't remember where it was hosted. Possibly at 1and1.co.uk web hosting, or I may have hosted it on the NAS itself, or an NSLU2 NAS which I converted to run debian linux. an NSLU2 was a very low power, very limited functionality server whose sole job was to serve files from a hard drive... But thanks to DD-WRT and then Debian, it could act like a Raspberry Pi

Fast forward again to about 2016 and I was playing with a fun text adventure language called Adventuron and was making lots of games for itch game jams, and I had rescued Shatneroids from my old Tardis website. I decided it was time to get a new Domain, since palaeomoo had lapsed a few years after the wedding. I had just joined social media and my friend Mike had taken a username which ended with "Monkey"... I liked that, and wanted to just set up an account to read stuff happening with the Arab Spring, so I just picked the first two words that came to mind "Dark Blue", probably because I was looking at something dark blue at the time. Little did I realise that I'd end up slowly posting things, and then it'd become my whole schtick! So, I went and registered darkbluemonkey.com. Amazingly it hadn't been taken (lol - who'd want it?!).

So, I needed a website builder. I couldn't be bothered using HTML to start from scratch. I tried using MSWord to make HTML but it looked awful. In the end, I decided to get a CMS. I had been a staunch Apache user since the early 2000's, but I realised that Apache (at the time) had a huge attack surface, was complicated, and very heavyweight. I didn't want to host the site in the house, because our internet was a piece of wet string at the time (literally, almost! - 500KILObits). So I wanted a single vCPU, very low-cost server somewhere in the cloud. Luckily 1and1 were offering some lovely deals on low-power self-hosted servers, so I rented one, stuck Debian on it and switched it from Apache to nginx.

Nginx is a lot sleeker than Apache. At the time, it was being touted as the "Apache killer", the sleek underdog that was going to take all the small site high-tech traffic away from the battleship that is Apache. I don't know if that ever happened, but I was very pleased with nginx's performance and footprint. So,with hosting and a web server sorted, I needed a CMS (Content Management System), or at least a functional Web Content System. I looked at Wordpress, and bounced off it. Wordpress needed mysql. Joomla! needed mysql, and I remembered that it was a bit of a pain locking it down, and it always played on my mind that there was an open socket (protected by a firewall, perhaps), which led into the database... So I looked for a "flat file" CMS, with a smaller footprint and attack surface. I found "Grav".

Grav's a nice CMS in its own way. Horribly complicated unless you're a Python guru (which I'm not). It took a long time to get it set up and working the way I wanted it to. I'm still puzzled how it works some days, but it does work, and I can do things like this blog with a plugin or two. Since it's flat file, there's no DB process, so I'm happy...

Fast forward again to 2025... 1and1 is now "Ionos", and they've improved their pricing even more... So I'm able to upgrade to a slightly more powerful virtual PC with a couple of cores and another Gig of RAM. The website is running lovely... and I'm actually starting to use the Blog function. Groovy!

Fast forward again to 2026, and I have a need to create another site which can do similar stuff to this... So my first impulse is to install Grav.... which brought me to a screeching halt. Looking back at 25 years of making my own websites, I've done everything I can to avoid using a database as a back-end if I can. A brief flirt with Joomla! showed me that I preferred flat files... BUT, the pain of setting it up, installing plugins and working with Python (gah! horrid system to work with imho), all gave me one of those Roy Schneider pan-zoom-in moments where I realised that I'd been making pain for myself because I was basically trying NOT to install Wordpress.

I have nothing specifically against Wordpress... I even opened a wordpress site on their free site at one point.... But I always felt it was somehow /wrong/ for me. I can't define how.... A little bit of "too heavyweight", a little "uses a database", a little "vulnerable to hacks through CGI", a little "It's for writing stories, not general websites".... I can't quite put my finger on it.... But when I looked at the VPC that was running DarkBlueMonkey.com, I realised there was spare capacity for mysql and some Python....

So, I set about installing it all on a cold sunday morning at 8am. By 10am, it was installed and set up. My gast had never been so flabbered. It JUST WORKED. I followed an online script which only had about 10 steps... and it all just worked flawlessly. I'd logged in, created a user, downloaded the first theme and was happily breaking it before lunchtime.

"Why oh why have I been avoiding Wordpress all these years?" - I thought... And then when I switched themes, the entire site went bang, and I realised that I still had a LOT more learning to go! I'd basically treated it like IIS, hosting websites. I then spent the rest of Sunday reading FAQs, designing pages, and then I went and deleted everything I'd done and started over. At around 2am on monday morning, the site was back, and responsive to Theme changes, and all the dynamic stuff was working dynamically.... Not bad.

I think back to the months I faffed with Zope, Joomla!, Drupal and Grav.... Now, I'm still pretty pleased with Grav. it's managed to survive a number of upgrades to both itself and the Debian OS. I've upgraded from Debian 10 to Debian 12 without needing to flatten and rebuild the server. PHP has gone from something like Version 5 to version 8.4, and it's all still working..

Yes, I think I'll stick with Grav for the foreseeable future... But I'm VERY impressed with how fast it was to set up a self-hosted Wordpress site. given how easy it was to register the new domain and grab the SSL certificate for the new site from Ionos (only £9 a year for the domain), it's a sub-24 hour process to go from zero to self-hosted awesomeness.

That's not quite the promise of those flashy ads the hyperscalers would have us watch, where a white-toothed blonde secretary has a bright idea, taps a few icons on her phone, and is then showered with Gucci and Armani gifts as the money from her Great Idea rolls in... But this time the return to Earth wasn't so much a bump as a gentle nudge.

Now, the question is..... Will the person I built the wordpress site for actually use it? :)