Pouring one out for chuqui.com
So…
Last night I pushed the button to start the button to start the domain transfer for chuqui.com. Once I did that, I set the domain on the old hosting service to redirect all connections to the new server, tore down the old server and cancelled the service, and here we are. Welcome to chuq.me. A project I started in June and estimated to take about 3 months ended near the end of August, so much to my surprise (and in my life, quite rare) I hit the dates just about exactly.
Why I did this
To be honest, I had hit a point where what I was doing required too much administration time, was too complex for what I was trying to accomplish, and it really didn’t represent who I am today as well as I wanted it to. Lots of history, but not all of it relevant. If you think about it in terms of how you maintain a house, you hit a point where you realize another coat of paint isn’t going to solve the problems in the bathroom and you call in the general contractor. And while many of the pieces on the new site may look similar to the old site, this was a gut job that was long overdue.
This re-do also is going to save me a non-trivial amount of money. That wasn’t a motivation when I started, but as I was evaluation options — specifically staying with Wordpress vs going to Squarespace, it quickly became clear I was spending a lot more money maintaining the site(s) than I realized, and that I had an opportunity to slim that down.
Here’s a breakdown of costs of the old server:
Dreamhost server (chuqui.com, using their Dreampress service): $240/year
Dreamhost server (various small or private VM hosts on a VPS server): $165/year
Wordpress expenses:
Theme license (Elegant Themes, $90/year. Also includes 2 premium plug-ins)
Jetpack Premium (Vaultpress backups, other features, and funnelling $ to Wordpress): $99/year
Smugmug Account (image portfolios): $200/year
Flickr Pro account (image galleries): $60/year
Cost per year: $854 — $71/month
The new environment:
Squarespace business plan: $216/year
G suite email: $70/year
Dreamhost server (various small or private VM hosts on a VPS server): $165/year
Flickr Pro account (image galleries): $60/year
Cost per year: $511 - $42/month (< 40%)
It’s easy to lose track of your total cost, especially when you start using premium themes and plug-ins and you tend to do annual payments. My monthly cost was way higher than I thought it would be before tracking it all down. Welcome to years of scope creep.
The money is nice, but the real reason I did this was simplification. You can see the parts it was my responsibility as admin to manage, identify and pay vendors, manage updates, etc. etc. etc. By shifting to Squarespace, the I go from my zone of responsibility being everything past the base Wordpress install (plug-ins, themes, design, content) to a much smaller set of things — just design and content. Plus, if I ever decide to do new stuff like e-Commerce (which I have considered and rejected due to adding even more cost/complexity to the environment) much of what I’d want to do is already bundled into this. No need to wire up and license Woo Commerce and manage all of those connections.
The goal was to make this all easier to manage moving forward without compromising on design or functionality, and Squarespace gave me that.
Having finished two site migrations to Squarespace now, I can say I’m really happy I did (the first was hockonvalleybirding.org, which was my test pigeon here).
Having said that, I have no complaints about Wordpress, Dreamhost or any of the services above. They all did great service and I found Dreamhost a very reliable service and when I needed customer support, they always came through quickly and reliably. I’m not leaving Dreamhost, for instance: I continue to have a VPS things like hockey.chuq.me and my file download site plus a number of private or semi-private VMs for various unspecified things. The hockey site is running Wordpress and one of the standard themes (which have gotten a lot better since my last major re-design) and I like it fine. I am leaving Smugmug reluctantly, but my original plan for it was to represent my “professional photography” me, which is no longer in the plans, and I do really love having the porfolio area on the main web site and in the same domain and not split onto a separate sub-domain. I could have done that in Wordpress, but never really found a gallery system I wanted to migrate to (and pay for).
So yeah, this migration is a big “it’s not you, it’s me” to all of those services, which I do recommend highly if they fit your needs. Mine changed.
How I did this
I could simply leave this at “a lot of grunt work”, which is true, but ignores a lot of things. Every blog post was read and evaluated. Many were “retired” and are now at the “retired blog post farm” romping in the meadows with all of the other blog posts that have gone 404 over the decades. I think I ended up retiring about 40% of the blog, not including the entire set of hockey writing, which I exported and moved to hockey.chuq.me. A lot of that was older stuff; there was a big shift around 2018 where I went from deleting a lot of entries to keeping most of them. All of the “Hey, next week I’m….” posts from two years or more ago are gone, for instance.
For 2018 and earlier I used a Wordpress export and an import into Squarespace to make it happen. All of them still needed some manual work (when I figured out to import them as Markdown even if they weren’t got me a better look, the amount of manual work went down a lot). Starting in 2018, every post was migrated manually. Same with all of the primary pages. Older stuff got simple edits for readability, in many cases, newer stuff got some updates.
My design style is very much iterative, or better thought of as “let’s start with this and then poke at it with a stick until I like it”. I’ve been tweaking it through the entire process as I learned more about Squarespace. The end result I like, but I also like I can re-think it or tweak it pretty easily. There is only one page I’m not happy with the design on, and that’s my birding lifelist. I spent two days trying things and then ultimately just imported the HTML and let it be. I’ll revisit it later, but since it’s not exactly a high priority, I didn’t feel I needed to delay everything else for it. I also had originally planned to rewrite my camera bag piece, and ended up just migrating the old one to avoid delays — but expect that to be updated as a near-future project.
Once I figured out the nuances of working with Squarespace, all this work went quickly. I wish I could tell you how many hours it took, but I didn’t track it (because I’m not insane); I was typically working on this project 1 weekend and 2 evenings a week. The silicon valley summer heat wave followed by the fires and lousy air quality did help me speed this along, FWIW. And the part I thought would take longest, those blog posts newer than 2018, actually moved very quickly because I had a system down. That made me happy.
I quickly realized I needed a way to track tasks for this project, and I settled on Taskpaper as an app for that. I’m quite happy with how it handled this for me and kept it separate from my personal and professional todo lists (which exist in Todoist). I might have found a way to do this in Todoist but having them in a separate app was simple and fast, so I am happy I made that choice.
As I look at it today, my list of tasks has 83 completed items and 13 left to do, all of them either tied to the domain migration for chuqui.com, or future contend additions. Some of those items were simple, like “buy this domain”, others not so, like “migrate 2017 blog posts”, which involved touching around 45 articles. This project needed some formal management, but I’m happy I kept it simple like this, and it worked fine. You do definitely need a place to keep reminders for yourself of details that need to be wrangled, or you’ll be very sad.
Wordpress vs Squarespace
So, as a long-time and continuing user of Wordpress and now a veteran of producing two sites on Squarespace, which do I recommend?
It depends. If you’re building something really simple and low-volume, a good, basic wordpress setup on Dreamhost can be as low as $3/month and Squarespace can’t touch that (their cheapest is about $12). As your needs grow, it becomes harder to say. If you like doing administration, Wordpress is a great platform. If you want others to worry about it, you can consider something like Dreampress, but I think Squarespace is better if you want something really turn-key. Squarespace is my default for projects moving forward that are going to be public facing and more than static sets of pages.
Yes, there is a lock-in factor to Squarespace that isn’t present in Wordpress — sort of — but I do have to note that my commitment to using Elegant Themes meant I also committed to using their Divi editing environment, which had its own lock-in aspects, and moving away from that was one reason I took on this project, because they did some redesign of it in the last 18 months that I didn’t like as well as the older editing systems. That said, lots of people use and love Divi, and if you look around the Wordpress world, you’ll see people grumping about Wordpress’s own Gutenberg redesign, too (which I can’t really comment on since my use of it has been trivially small). I am comfortable with the idea of being locked into Squarespace for the next decade and if I’m still live and still care about having anything online then, I’ll figure it out. But it is an issue you need to consider making your own decisions.
Both platforms are great and work well for most situations, depending on what you try to do. I’ve shifted from being Wordpress centric to Squarespace leaning in my choices. But I can and will continue to use both as they make sense.
What’s next?
Those 13 unfinished task lists is the main priority, and some of them are maybe a couple of hours work, and some of them may take me weeks.
First up will be the camera bag update.
I’m also finding myself wondering if it makes sense to migrate the Flickr site onto chuq.me, but I’m paid up there until 2022, so I’m leaving that one alone for a while.
I’ve just finished learning enough about G-suite to make sure the domains managed under it do the right thing with email addresses, so that things like abuse@ don’t fail. Which has me wondering whether it makes sense to move my email address from chuqui@mac.com to chuq@chuq.me. Mostly that idea has me feeling like going and lying down until it goes away, but I expect I’m going to give this more consideration.
This also has me considering trying to merge the (way too many) address books I have spread across so many systems into one master address book on G Suite. Again, this makes me want to lie down with a washcloth over my eyes until the idea goes away, but I think it’s going to suck up some of my time.
Mostly, though, I hope it means more time with binoculars and cameras and writing content for here again, now that I’m not spending 10+ hours a week editing to get this site ready for prime time.
We’ll see. What I know right now is I feel it was worth the effort, and I’m happy with the results. We’ll see what happens moving forward from here…
I’m going to experiment with turning comments on and see what happens, so drop me a comment and tell me what you think, what you like or don’t. And we’ll see how that works out…
