I’ve been blogging at wiobyrne.com since I bought the domain and installed WordPress in 2009. It started as a task for my comprehensive exams during my dissertation. Over the years I spun up other sites for various projects (WikiSpaces, Google Sites, more WordPress) but I kept coming back here, tweaking the look and feel and otherwise leaving WordPress to do its thing.
I finally rebuilt the site because the way I write had already changed, and the site hadn’t caught up.
For the last couple of years, everything I write starts as plain Markdown in an Obsidian vault. Ideas come in and turn into notes, book notes, publication drafts, blog posts. The writing process had quietly moved into a clean, portable pipeline I actually trusted. WordPress was still a separate, heavier thing I had to wrestle with every time I wanted to publish. At some point the gap stopped making sense. The site should work the way the writing already did.
WordPress had become something I maintained more than I used. It was bloated and slow, and the security notices never quite stopped. Running a heavy, database-backed stack to serve what is ultimately a collection of essays, notes, and publications had started to feel unnecessary.
I was also thinking about stewardship. A static site is simpler, faster, and requires fewer resources to serve. That may seem small, but I wanted a website that made fewer demands on both the infrastructure behind it and the people trying to reach it. Not everyone visits the web with a new laptop, a fast connection, or unlimited bandwidth. A lighter site is more accessible to readers on older devices and slower networks, and it costs less to keep online.
Some of this came from a colleague who was retiring and asked how he might publish his blog for free. I didn’t have a good answer. But the question stuck with me, and I started thinking about how to strip his site (and ultimately mine) down to the basic elements and make that approach available to others. In that sense the move wasn’t only about performance or control. It was about building something more durable, more portable, more environmentally conscious, and more responsible. A site that could do its job with a fraction of the complexity and footprint.
That brought me to static site generators (SSG). An SSG works differently from a traditional CMS (content management system) like WordPress. Instead of building pages on demand every time someone visits, it generates them ahead of time and publishes them as simple HTML files. For a site like mine, mostly essays, book notes, publications, and other long-form writing, that made a lot of sense. The content doesn’t need a complex database or dozens of plugins running behind the scenes. It just needs to be available, readable, and easy to maintain.
There are a lot of great SSGs out there. I settled on Astro because it fit my needs and gets out of the way. It lets me work with plain content, render static pages, and keep the public surface fast. It also makes it easy to separate the things that matter to readers from the things that only matter to the build. I write a post, add some metadata on one side, and leave the rendering machinery on the other. Those turn out to be editorial decisions as much as technical ones, and I wanted them to feel that way.
As a reminder, this site is one of two places my knowledge vault feeds. The other is an exploratory garden at digitallyliterate.net, where the same Markdown-first workflow carries the newsletter and looser, in-progress notes. The colophon explains more about this site and how the two relate. For now it’s enough to say they share a brain and serve different purposes.
What changed
The new site is less about showing off a system and more about supporting a reading experience.
If this is a place I expect people to actually read, then the layout has to help with reading. So the navigation got quieter, the typography does more of the work, and each page has a clearer job. I don’t want the public site to feel like a dashboard or a feed. I want it to feel like a place where someone can arrive, orient themselves, and decide whether they want to keep reading.
That’s the deeper reason for the rebuild. I wasn’t just changing tools. I was changing the relationship between the writing, the design, and the public record. Making the site behave like a reading space instead of a stack of separate parts stitched together by habit.
Ironically, the migration became much larger than I intended. I could have started with a template and finished quickly. Instead, I spent months designing and rebuilding from scratch, and along the way developed a design framework I call Apparatus. An attempt to think more carefully about readability, organization, and what a personal website should actually do.
Where this goes next
This post is the beginning, not the explanation of everything.
The rest of the series gets more specific. Why I built Apparatus, what the colophon explains, and how the publishing workflow actually moves an idea from the vault to the right public surface. That last one is the part I care about most.
Because in the end, the move from WordPress to Astro wasn’t really about WordPress or Astro. This is all about closing or reducing the distance between thinking, writing, and publishing. The site now feels less like a destination and more like a natural extension of the work itself. A space built to show its own thinking.