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Ditching WordPress during a two-hour meeting

Oh no!

A few minutes before a two-hour meeting I wanted to look something up on my booklog, boeken.tsuk.org, a site I have been keeping (on and off) since 2002. What I got instead was a cheerful Dreamhost placeholder page — boeken.tsuk.org is almost here! — and, underneath, helpfully: Upload your website to get started.

The website had been there for close to twenty years.

Some digging in my spam folder later I discovered Dreamhost's security systems had decided the site was hacked and being used for phishing, and had responded the way you'd child-proof a house you never intend to enter again: by spraying .htaccess files into literally every folder, locking visitors out of all of it. Eh.

I was a little worried at first, but that quickly gave way to "I'm not angry I'm just disappointed", and once the initial oh come on subsided, I was actually mostly relieved: this was the eviction notice the site had been waiting years for.

The patient

Boeggn — tagline: Altijd al een boeklog willen bijhouden, "always wanted to keep a booklog" — is a book log in Dutch. A page per book read (if I finish the book, if I find the time to write a short review, if the site isn't dying on me, if I don't forget it, if I can actually be bothered): a cover, a rating, a paragraph or three or ten of what I thought of it. The first entry is dated 21 August 2002; the most recent, when the lights went out, late May 2026. In between: 889 published books, 567 approved comments, 1,367 uploaded images, and 2,764 post revisions.

The "on and off" was often more off than on. Plot the entries per year and you get less a publishing schedule than a polygraph readout of two and a half decades: one book in 2002, silence, a trickle in 2009, then 138 in 2011 and an almost implausible 248 in 2012, tapering through the twenty-teens to exactly one book in 2023, then back up to 86 in 2024.

(Rest assured that my OCD did not allow me to not keep a list of books read.)

Technically, the site was a custom WordPress theme I built myself, with lots of gaffer tape and chewing gum keeping the parts somewhat connected, running on a shared Dreamhost server that had felt, for years on end, like a mosquito swimming in honey (hence the drop-offs when WordPress became unmanageably slow and the spurts when it mysteriously became a little faster again). The site was still there because Dreamhost was cheap, because moving it was hassle, and because I certainly didn't feel like digging into that theme again and making it work in some more elegant way than it did. Inertia is a perfectly serviceable hosting strategy, and in my experience most problems tend to go away when you ignore them long enough, ahem.

This is a quick write-up about the work I/we did today. A lighter story than the one about my father's thesis: nothing here needed a vision model or an editorial conscience, just a spine, a database dump, and some free time during a meeting. In order: strangler-fig rebuild ftw; stuff I found in the database; the redesign I had been putting off for years; the author data, which turned out to be the actual rabbit hole; and what the site is like to live with now (but actually not — see the update).