Alive and Kicking

I received an email a few days ago from SiteLock stating that malware was detected on my website. Initially, I thought it was a phishing attempt since I hadn’t used the mentioned hosting provider for years. However, I decided to check just to be sure. I hadn’t visited my website for over a year, as I was keeping it mostly for archival purposes with a Wordpress instance and auto-updates enabled.

When I visited the site, everything seemed normal at first. I navigated through some entries and didn’t notice anything suspicious. However, this changed when I tried logging in. I found out that I couldn’t access the admin panel or make any changes. This confirmed that the email was likely legitimate.

This incident reminded me that even with automatic updates, it’s essential to check your site’s health periodically. A plugin or theme developer might stop maintaining their package, causing your installation to miss updates. This is probably what happened to me.

A fresh installation of Wordpress with the previous database brought the site back online and clean. I realized that the theme I was using was no longer available, so I switched to the default 2025 theme and disabled some plugins. Then, I decided to simplify the site further by moving away from Wordpress and using a static site generator, which would enhance security and speed.

This experiment resulted in the website you see now. I chose Hugo as the static site generator. I had heard about it a few years ago and briefly thought that I can use it in my website, but decided against it (it was simply not worth the hassle). But now I’m glad I tried it. For the theme, I’m using Maverick with some minor adjustments. And I even ported all comments (without trackbacks) using utterances, a mini comments widget built on GitHub issues.

Just for an additional info, I know that there are some other static site generators out there. But instead of reading detailed comparisons, I picked one that seemed promising and tested it.

So, here is the result. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do…