Did I intentionally use 3 different smart quotes in the title? You bet I did! But did it require a few trips to fileformat.info and some Python to figure out what the proper octal escape sequences are? As a matter of fact, yes. Yes it did. And if you’re wondering, they’re \342\200\231, \342\200\234, and \342\200\235¹.

The last time I rewrote RogerHub.com was in November of 2010, more than 6 years ago. Before that, I was using this PHP/MySQL blogging software that I wrote myself. RogerHub ran on cheap shared hosting that cost $44 USD per year. I moved the site to WordPress because I was tired of writing basic features (RSS feeds, caching, comments, etc.) myself. The whole migration process took about a week. That includes translating my blog theme to WordPress, exporting all my articles², and setting up WordPress via 2000s-era web control panels and FTP.

Maybe it’s that time again? The time when I’m unhappy with my website and need to do something drastic to change things up.

To be fair, my “personal blog” doesn’t really feel like a blog anymore. Since RogerHub now gets anywhere between 2¹⁷ to 2²¹ visitors per month, it demands a lot more of my attention than a personal blog really should. During final exam season, I log onto my website every night to collect my reward: a day’s worth of final exam questions and outdated memes³. Meanwhile, I wrote 3 blog posts last year and just 1 the year before that.

I want to take back my blog. And I want to strategically reduce the amount of time I spend managing the comments section without eliminating them altogether. Lately I’ve been too scared to make changes to my blog, because of how it might break other parts of the site. On top of that, I have to build everything within the framework of WordPress, an enormous piece of software written by strangers in a language that gives me no pleasure to use. I miss when it didn’t matter if I broke everything for a few hours, because I was editing my site directly in production over FTP. And every time WordPress announces a new vulnerability in some JSON API or media attachments (all features that I don’t use), I miss running a website where I owned all of the code.

So on nights and weekends over the last 5 months, I’ve been working on a complete rewrite of RogerHub from the ground up. And you’re looking at it right now.

Why does it look exactly the same as before? Well, I lied. I didn’t rewrite the frontend or any of the website’s pages. But all the stuff under the hood that’s responsible for delivering this website to your eyeballs has been replaced with entirely new code⁴.

The rewrite replaces WordPress, NGINX, HHVM, Puppet, MySQL, and all the miscellaneous Python and Bash scripts that I used to maintain the website. RogerHub is now just a single Go program, running on 3 GCE instances, each with a PostgreSQL database, fronted by Google Cloud Load Balancer.

Although this website looks the same, I’ve made a ton of improvements behind the scenes that’ll make it easier for me to add features with confidence and reduce the amount of toil I perform to maintain the site. I’ll probably write more about the specifics of what’s new, but one of the most important things is that I can now easily run a local version of RogerHub in my apartment to test out new changes before pushing them live⁵. I’ve also greatly improved my rollout and rollback processes for new website code and configuration.

Does this mean I’ll start writing blogs again? Sure, probably.

I’m not done with the changes. I’ve only just finished the features that I thought were mandatory before I could migrate the live site over to the new system. I performed the migration last night and I’ve been working on post-migration fixes and cleanup all day today. It’s getting late, so I should just finish this post and go to sleep. But I’ll leave you with this nice photo. I used to end these posts with funny comics and reddit screencaps.

It’s a little wider than usual, because I’m adding new features, and this is the first one.