Happy New 2026 everyone!
This site used to run on a very old WordPress instance. It worked, but it was not kept up to date, the Cloudflare proxy likely helped prevent it from being compromised. Updating WordPress in 2026 felt like software archaeology; moving the blog to a static site was long overdue.
DNS was already hosted on Cloudflare, so Cloudflare Pages was the obvious choice. Hugo was chosen because it is relatively common for static sites and integrates well with Cloudflare and GitHub Pages.
The WordPress content needed to be cleaned up, so I asked ChatGPT to write a Python script to process the WordPress export.xml using a --selected list_of_good_posts.txt. Posts from the selected list went into /posts, while everything else was moved into /archives.
Next, I wanted to adjust styling to provide some continuity, so I started from an existing Hugo theme and adjusted CSS and templates to roughly match the old site’s look. Social links in the header and a year/month–aggregated archive view required layout template overrides. ChatGPT helped with that, but this step took most of the time.
Finally, Cloudflare provides an easy integration with Hugo sites: pushing to a repository triggers a build process inside Cloudflare and a CDN update.
The end result, after roughly a day of work, is a static site with no moving parts beyond a Git push. The legacy content is still there, the new posts are easy to find, and the whole thing is cheaper, simpler, and more maintainable. For a personal blog, that is good enough.