I purchased a WordPress subscription and finally migrated princiya.com to WordPress.com. Over the years my blog has evolved from WordPress > Hugo > Jekyll > Gatsby > Pelican > Hashnode > Astro > WordPress.

When I first started to blog I used the free tier of WordPress. You can check the oldest posts here in my blog. I still recall, how back then, I was happy to write and that’s it. I didn’t have any intention in building an audience or growing my blog.

I then tried Hugo, because I wanted to code my blog, and back then Go was a new programming language. It was a good experience to learn more about static site generators.

I could not customise the Hugo blog as much as I wanted, so I was inspired to try Jekyll next. I ran into the same problem with Jekyll by not being able to customise as much as I had hoped for.

Javascript being my primary forte language, Gatsby was my default choice next. I was pretty happy with Gatsby for a long time. I even wrote a custom plugin for the Gatsby blog to automate the generation of GIFs for the social sharing cards. Here’s that blog post.

Gatsby’s blog was going pretty well. Back then I was also learning how to improve on the SEO, and build audience and I had significant results. I then had a period where I got busy with work and could not keep the node_modules up to date in the Gatsby blog. When I revisited my blog after a long period of inactivity I ran into a dependency management hell with Gatsby and that’s when I pivoted to Pelican.

At this time, I was at Anaconda. Python was everywhere in the air and I could not help from trying out Pelican, the Python-based static site generator. Pelican was straightforward. But I ran into the same problems where I could not customise the blog the way I had hoped for similar to my experience with Hugo and Jekyll.

I was also publishing on Medium. At one point I also purchased a Hashnode subscription last year when they came up with the AI version to help write better blogs and SEO. I rarely used that AI feature on Hashnode and this year I discontinued it.

Same time, last year, I wanted to rewrite my blog and a redesign it. That’s when I decided to try Astro. Astro is still promising at the time of writing this post. Work kept me pretty busy and with the little time I got to do anything at all, I kept working on my blog redesign with Astro. In between, I had to upgrade Astro because Astro is in constant development. A few months after inactivity, I ran into the same problem as Gatsby where I had the dependency management and upgrade hell yet again! Here’s the Astro version that I attempted.

That was the peak. I had to reevaluate my choices. I wanted to write blog posts without worrying about dependencies. I wanted to customise my blog the way I wanted to. I wanted SEO support. That’s when I decided to purchase WordPress subscription and here I am with a revamped version for my blog.

Let me know if you enjoyed reading this article. And what are you using for your blog?