Back in 2002, I set up this blog on b2. A year later, b2 updates had stagnated, I migrated it to a fork of b2 called WordPress.

In the intervening 21 years, WordPress has gone on to power a huge fraction of the web. But in my opinion the project has lost its way, starting with the move to the Gutenberg block editor in 2018 and trying to become everything to everyone instead of just really good blogging software.

In response to the Block Editor merge, another project forked WordPress to create ClassicPress. Initially it was more or less WordPress Minus Gutenberg, but they’ve continued to do their own development as well, from cleaning up old complex code to improving the way media management works. I sorta kept up with it for a while, but finally decided to really evaluate it this month, and it’s actually really good! So I migrated a couple of test blogs, then Katie’s Feral Tomatoes.

Then I started looking at what it would take to migrate this 22-year-old, 3,255-post behemoth of a blog. (And that’s after moving a bunch of posts to other parts of my site, and deleting a bunch of no-longer-useful posts like ‘Migrated from 1.1 to 1.2. Let me know what’s broken.” or “Check out this weird link!” with no commentary (especially when the weird link is long-dead by now anyway).

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The B2 /Cafelog project is evolving into WordPress. I finally got around to updating the software, and I’ve run into a few problems with some of my customizations. Mainly there’s no “On This Page” list on the sidebar, but if you notice anything else odd or broken-looking, comment on it here!

For a while now I’ve been thinking of setting up something where I can just post random thoughts or opinion pieces without taking the time to write an HTML page and update bunches of links. Some sort of blogging software seemed ideal, so I looked at a few, noticed they all seemed to use MySQL, and left it for a while.

Well, I moved the site to a Linux server a few weeks ago, and so I started looking again. And since Katie’s site is currently under the same domain name, we both figured it would be cool to have something we could both post to.

I settled on b2 (shortly before the site ran out of bandwidth), mainly because it was simple, it used PHP, and it allowed me to set up more than one user.

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