Blake Ashley Jr.

Impassable Cloudflare Challenges Are Ruining My Browsing Experience

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 10:25:00 -0800

I travel often. Sometimes I use a VPN, sometimes I don’t. I use a heavily customized Firefox config on Linux.

Cloudflare challenges have made large portions of the web unusable for me.

Some recent examples

The “unsubscribe” button in Indeed’s job notification emails leads me to an impassable Cloudflare challenge. The “Contact Us” page is also behind an impassable Cloudflare challenge.
While migrating a non-profit off of A2 Hosting, their login forces me to re-enter credentials after failing a challenge, looping endlessly.
On a particularly ironic note, I tried to complain on the Cloudflare Forums—met with another impassable challenge.

When reachable, customer support always says “try a mobile data connection”, “switch to Chrome”, or some other variant of “too bad, so sad”.

Is anyone else dealing with this mess?

Note: This site is regertablly hosted by Cloudflare Pages, but I have it on my list to move to a self-hosted solution soon.

Read more and join the conversation at https://blakeashleyjr.com/posts/cloudflare-challenges-are-ruining-my-browser-experience/

Plaintext as a Hedge Against Productivity System Creep

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 14:04:21 -0800

I have tried every productivity system imaginable, pairing them with every conceivable app out there, spending countless hours tuning dials and configuring things just the way I need “to get work done.”

For many years, Todoist was my go-to tool. However, I decided to transition away due to concerns about data sovereignty. In my quest for the perfect system, I set up countless rules, reminders, and filters.

But eventually, I realized I was spending more time refining my system than actually working.

After moving away from Todoist, I established a simple plain-text knowledge management system using Markdown and Git that I lovingly call Elephant. Initially, it felt restrictive; I missed the comforting reminders, filters, advanced logic, and recurring tasks (which now required manual input).

Yet, I’ve grown to appreciate these limitations. There’s no temptation to tweak settings endlessly. Now, I face two straightforward choices: to work or not to work. And I find this simplicity liberating.

The essence of software is to automate manual work. But if the automation (and the maintenance it requires) consumes more time than the task itself, it loses its purpose.

Thus, I’m embracing my plain-text system, along with its limitations, and I have never been more productive.

Read more and join the conversation at https://blakeashleyjr.com/posts/plaintext-as-hedge-against-system-creep/

Vendor Unlocking My Life

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 11:24:13 -0600

In an era where digital dependence is commonplace, I moved towards personal tech independence in 2023. This blog post details my transition away from mainstream tech giants and towards more secure, private, and autonomous alternatives.

Breaking Free from the Norm

In 2023, I finally broke free from the likes of Google, Facebook, and other tech giants—a commitment I’d long made to myself but never fulfilled. Like many of you, Google and Facebook had been my internet cornerstones for years, offering convenience, cost-effectiveness, and entertainment.

On a professional level, I’ve always been cognizant of the threat of ‘vendor lock-in’. How reliant am I on a single service, and what’s the fallout if it vanishes overnight?

A personal turning point came with a widely-reported incident: a father wrongfully accused by Google’s algorithms of possessing child sex abuse material in his private messages. This automated and erroneous finding led to the freezing of his account and immediate notification to law enforcement.

Realizing the extent of my dependence on a few major players like Google was a wake-up call. My goal for 2023 was clear: to minimize my dependency on any single platform or service.

Improvements I Made This Year:

Email/Calendar

My first step was to address my email and calendar dependencies.

Migrated away from my 15-year-old Google account
- Switched to Proton Mail for enhanced privacy and security.¹
- Transitioned to using my own domains for email.
- Set up PGP using my own keys for secure communication.
- Moved scheduling to Cal.com for opensource scheduling.
- I setup SimpleLogin to use my own domain (a throwaway) for private email forwwarding. Should SimpleLogin disappear, I could keep all these emails flowing.
Todo:
- Implement an automated email backup system.
- Figure out a solution for calendar synchronization.²
- Transition away from Google Photos (Currently locked-in due to family use).
- Permanently delete my Google account after a few more months of email forwarding.

Messaging

Moved (almost exclusively) to Signal and Simplex for private and secure messaging.
Successfully convinced many friends and family to switch to Signal.
Using Simplex as a secure alternative to email for communications with strangers.
Stopped using Discord
- I’ve enjoyed Matrix for quick questions and community building, despite not being a big fan of chatrooms for most use cases due to their lack of external searchability, synchronicity, etc.³
Todo:
- Get the remaining friends and family on Signal.
- Consider self-hosting my own Simplex infrastructure.
- Migrate to a self-hosted Matrix server.

Embraced the fediverse by switching to Mastodon and Lemmy.
Deleted my Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook accounts, prioritizing privacy and control over my digital social life.
Todo:
- Plan to self-host my own Mastodon and Lemmy instances.

Web Hosting

Migrated to a static site powered by Hugo for enhanced portability and control.
Todo:
- Move away from Cloudflare hosting for greater independence.
- Enable Tor access to my site for increased privacy and accessibility.
- Self-host my newsletter system.

Homelab

Undertook a massive overhaul by moving dozens of services into a self-hosted k3s cluster and Ceph storage.
Transitioned all my physical media into Jellyfin, supporting DRM-free content and direct purchases from creators.
Installed security cameras around my home, ensuring they operate exclusively within my LAN and backups are encrypted.
In the process of migrating all file storage to a blend of Nextcloud and Syncthing, for a seamless and secure file management system.

MISC

Now using VPN and Tor exclusively for web browsing, with very few exceptions (like banking).
Sites that block Tor and/or VPN (including incessant CAPTCHA requirements) no longer receive my patronage.

Todo in 2024

Do a full account audit, going through my password manager and updating emails/passwords, adding 2FA, or deleting accounts when not in use.
Plan to replace my current Pixel device, which has a locked bootloader, with an unlocked device running GrapheneOS.
Intend to replace my desktop and laptop with Nvidia GPUs for a setup that fully supports Wayland with AMD or Intel GPU, then move exclusively to a Linux desktop.
Github still has an iron hold on my code. My plan is to self-host Forgejo and mirror public repos to Github. I hope the Activitypub movement can make its way to git and allow us to move off of centralized fit providers like Githubs.
Switch as much of my financial life over to opensource, private, and decentralized currencies as possible. Monero is my currency of choice.
Break my dependence on YouTube, for personal and privacy reasons. I use privacy respecting frontends and clients, but the service still has a strong grip on me.

Stay tuned for more updates on my journey to tech independence and how you can do the same.

Proton Mail is not perfect, because email is not perfect. I do believe Proton does care about privacy and has made huge strides for consumers however. For paramount security, I use PGP to encrypt messages before they even hit the browser. ↩︎
Currently, I sync my calendars with reclaim.ai, but I’m seeking alternatives that don’t require a Google account. ↩︎
I’ll elaborate on this later, but my preference for asynchronous communication stems from its ability to slow down life’s pace. Discord, in particular, poses privacy and centralization issues and lacks external searchability, making it inefficient for structured support or documentation. ↩︎

Read more and join the conversation at https://blakeashleyjr.com/posts/vendor-unlocking-my-life/

Elephant: My Plain-Text Work System

Sun, 21 May 2023 17:28:00 -0700

In his excellent book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt details a metaphor for the relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds: the elephant and the rider. The rider thinks he controls the towering beast because it generally follows his commands, slowly lumbering from side to side at the pull of the reins. Little does the rider know, the elephant could throw the rider to his death or great injury at any moment. If the rider pushes too hard or demands too much, he may lose what he thought was the unconditional obedience of the elephant. Instead, a wise rider must form a mutually beneficial relationship, a friendship, with the elephant, just as our conscious mind must be gentle and loving with our subconscious mind (if we want to get anything valuable out of it.)

When I was younger, I thought of my subconscious as a simple computer. A computer obeys me when I tell it to do something, immediately dedicating everything it has to my command. My subconscious was not so compliant.

And so, I began years of productivity cycles. At first, my rider would excite the elephant, driving him faster and faster. The results were good. My elephant would soon tire, however, and the fun would be over. Eventually, my elephant knew I was a liar. No matter what I promised, he knew I was going to drive him until he gave out. So he stopped obeying, and I don’t blame him.

This created a vicious and painful cycle. The only way I could get things done was if the threat of failure was so great I could rouse my distrustful elephant to action. If there was no meaningful deadline, I did not do anything.¹

In response to this, I developed increasingly complicated organizational systems for myself. It was my system that failed me, I would tell myself. My schedule was not planned tightly enough. My will was not sufficient.

Organization, of course, was not the problem. It was a distraction.

While my elephant lay exhausted or otherwise unwilling to move, my rider spent his days planning the journey. Instead, he should have been tending his elephant.² My subconscious is not a computer. It is an elephant. There is no such thing as an internal command, only requests. Each thing I do is a negotiation with the lumbering beast I depend on.

A rider looks far down the road, guiding the elephant on a path that will lead him to long-term flourishing, but the rider carefully listens to the desires of his trusty mount, tending to his needs with care and swiftness.

This philosophical shift in the way I view productivity brought practical changes to my day-to-day life. Instead of constantly looking for new tools and hacks to “optimize” my day or developing increasingly complex productivity systems, my focus shifted down to my elephant.

My productivity system has since become an after-thought, part of the background as much as possible. It is more like the desk my tools sit on than the tools themselves.

I now focus primarily on how I complete tasks, rather than what I complete. My elephant is now my friend, not an object I can squeeze value from.

This led me to develop a basic productivity and knowledge system that is entirely plain-text. I explain why this is important later on. It is a collection of markdown files that I synchronize with Syncthing and Git. I edit them in VSCode or using a text editor on my phone.

I named it “Elephant” after my new best friend.

As a result, my productivity and my happiness have skyrocketed.

I organize my system in the root of a directory like this:

/[year]
    /[month]
        /[week]
            /[day]
                daily-review.md
                notes.md
                one-off-task-or-small-projecct.md
/projects
    /[sample project]
        /note.md
        /web-clipping.md
/templates
    daily-review.md
    weekly-review.md
    monthly-review.md
    quarterly-review.md
    yearly-review.md
    state-of-the-union.md
inbox.md

Planning / Review

Every morning, I create the day’s markdown file by copying the daily-review template into the day’s folder, while creating any required folders above it. Note the state-of-the-union.md³.

Here is a sample of that template:

# Daily Planning / Review

## Good morning!

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

---

## Daily Planning

### Wake up routine

[ ]  Stretch
[ ]  Meditation and Prayer for 10 minutes
[ ]  Read the Bible for 15 minutes
[ ]  Have a protein shake
[ ]  Take my vitamins

### Planning Routine

[ ]  Make office spotless
[ ]  Review my calendar for the day
[ ]  Make sure there are no conflicts
[ ]  If there are conflicts, develop a resolution plan immediately
[ ]  Review Todolist

---

## Rules for 2023

- God is good.

- Money is a tool to provide for my family, help people in my community, and further God's will on earth, nothing more.

- Work is good.
  - Work makes my life and the life of my family better.
  - Work feels good.
  - Consistently work 8 hour days.

## Goals for 2023

- Write one blog post per week
- Get down to 175lbs by Christmas
- Etc.

---

## Mid-day Journal and Brainstorming

*What’s on your mind?*

---

## 1. Be sure to do the following

[ ]  Clear task list
[ ]  Clear inbox
[ ]  Review the calendar for today
[ ]  Review your events tomorrow
[ ]  Copy all physical notes into Elephant
[ ]  Save copy of all documents into Elephant

## 3. Answer the following questions

- How did you feel today?
- How was your relationship with Christ?
- Were you kind to [my wife]?
- Did you do anything for any other relationship?
- How productive were you in general?
- How organized were you?

## 4. Overview, how was your day? Any lasting thoughts for future you?

## 5. Lastly, any tasks, plans, ideas, tools, etc. come to mind?

## ***Have a great night! You earned it!***

This template is organized from most important (and usually first in the day) to least important. This is crucial, because I typically don’t complete the whole thing, certainly not every day. That’s okay. I go as far as the elephant wants to go, perhaps with a reasonable amount of prodding.

First thing in the morning, I do a few things to center myself on the things that matter. I try to frame the day during my prayer and meditation. I ask God to help me work. My body also needs some attention to give me what I need during the day, so I stretch and have a protein shake.

Before I begin working, I review two important concepts: rules and goals. Rules are the guiding principles of my life and work that I want to remind myself of. These are easily forgotten truths that require reminding and will (hopefully) inform my thought, word, and deed throughout the day. These are what keep the elephant walking.

Goals are things that I want to do, usually by a certain date. The examples are abbreviated for privacy reasons, but I try not to overdo it in general. These are where the elephant is going.

As they day progresses, I begin to reflect on what has happened. I take notes. I review the things I have done. The questions and tasks provide a guideline to facilitate that if I feel like it.

I do something similar at the end of every week, month, quarter, and year. My elephant needs to regularly hear that I care about him, and, in return, he trusts me when I tell him what is important.

If I miss one, I don’t stress. It’s okay. Keep moving and do it tomorrow.

Notes

It is easy to over-think notes. They have traditionally been a black hole of my time and energy trying to build a better system ad infinitum. So, I decided to keep it as simple as possible.

My notes are written in Markdown and have a single h1 at the top. That’s it. I can add more if the thought requires it, but frequently don’t.

I divide notes into two categories, those that are tied to a project and those that are not.

Notes that are tied to a project go into a folder named after that project in /projects.

Notes that are not tied to a project go into that day’s folder.

That’s it. It has been freeing not to rely on some advanced system I will eventually drop because it’s too much work.

What about search, tags, categories, mind maps, knowledge maps, embeds, etc.??

You don’t need them. I rely on the search in VSCode and have never had a problem finding something I wanted to remember. I intentionally think about relevant words my future self may use to search and include those in the note.

Tasks

So now that I have convinced my elephant to walk, what route should we take to our destination? I said earlier that I no longer focus primarily on what I do, instead focusing on how I do it. That is true, but I still require a simple list to get me through the day.

I looked at a few of the leading plain-text to-do systems and saw pros and cons in each. In the end, I developed my own, heavily inspired by xit.

Each day has a tasks.md. At the end of the day, I copy that tasks.md into the next day’s folder, while marking tasks complete or obsolete. In the morning, I check the priorities still make sense and get going.

# Current Tasks

## Now

[ ] Finish blog post on Elephant

[ ] ! Complete work project and email boss about it

[ ] Book Play Tickets -> 5-10-2023

## Next

[ ] Buy gift for brother

[@] Get the flight sim setup #personal

### Dated

[ ] ! File taxes before deadline #chores -> 03-18-2023

### Undated

[ ] ! Audit all accounts in Bitwarden
    - [ ] Delete unnecessary accounts
    - [ ] Change email and personal info in necessary ones

[ ] !! Reach out to accountant for status

## Reocurring

[ ] Do laundry -> every tues

[ ] Check the air filter #chores -> 1st of every 3rd month (last done on 02/01/23)

[ ] Submit my expense report -> 1st workday of each month

### Waiting

[@] Reach back out to contractor

## Someday/Maybe

[ ] !! Learn German

## Done

[X] ! Freeze credit


## Guide

[ ] This is an open item
[ ] ! This is an important task
[ ] !! This is a less important but still important task
[x] This is a checked item
[@] This is an ongoing item
[~] This is an obsolete item
[?] This is an item in question
[ ] This shall be done by -> 2023-08-31

My to-do list is carefully designed not to spook the elephant. Most tasks do not have a due date. I avoid them unless they are necessary. The potential stress of them usually outweighs their benefit, especially for me. Most tasks do not need to be done before a specific date if you get to them in a timely manner.

You will not find a “today” section. Before, I would always end up with 20+ tasks due “today,” no matter what I tried. Instead, I focus on now. Now might change throughout the day, depending on how much I accomplish, or it may stay the same for a few days over a weekend or as I work on a big project. So I only have “now” and “next” for tasks that have to be done soon. Otherwise, they go into the “dated” or “undated” sections. I use those to backflll things as I complete them.

I find this combination of plain-text, simpleness, and pressure avoidance really works wonders for my productivity. Most days, I am able to make progress on what I need to do, which is a miracle knowing where I came from. Occasionally, I won’t get much done, and that’s okay. It’ll still be there when I get back, only without any warnings or red text telling me how much of a failure I have been.

Why Plain-Text?

Plain-text is both a practical and philosophical choice.

It is practical:

- It is interoperable and readable anywhere. I do not have to rely on any company or tool to access my thoughts, memories, and ideas.

- It is fast and light. I can open this text file on any operable computer on the planet. I do not need to wait on things to load. A decade's worth of thoughts take up almost no space at all.

- I do not need to be connected to the internet.

- I have much more control over my favorite text editor (VSCode) than I would any other app.

It is philosophical:

- Apps enforce a philsophy by definition. They are taking my input and organizing them in a specific and opininated way. That can be great, especially if I built the app or the app maker thinks a lot like me. I want freedom. I want to be able to customize my templates and system at will, without enforcing that change on the past.

- Apps usually control my data. Without special precautions, I could lose my work in the event a company goes out of business, changes their policies, decides they don't like me, misunderstands me.

- Plain-text is easily private. I control where these files go. I can encrypt them without much trouble. I don't have to give a company access to the most private records of my life.

- Plain-text is simple. I have a problem with over-complicating systems. There is only so much you can complicate with plain-text.

- I want to focus on words. Words represent ideas, thoughts, dreams, memories, or plans. I want as little as possible between my brain and words.

I plan diving into this more in other posts.

What about perseverance and self-discipline?

This is a long game. Just like trust with another person takes time. It takes time for your elephant to trust you.

Perseverance is important, when necessary. When I was disordered, everything I did required perseverance, because it was such an event to complete the task. As my elephant began to trust me, he understood that when I asked him to push through, it was actually required.

Self-discipline is important, but it requires a foundation. I need to be healthy before I could “push through” the desire to quit or my lack of energy. I had to build my subconscious (as it relates to work) up from the ground before there was anything to push with. As I become more and more ordered, I naturally develop the ability to work longer and harder. My elephant gets stronger and healthier over time, as I treat him right.

Conclusion

My elephant is my friend and my companion. If I want to get to my destination (flourishing, success, peace), I must persuade the elephant to get up and start walking. If I abuse my elephant, he will not trust me. He will not obey me. So I will resort to increasingly abusive methods to compel his obedience. Eventually he will be broken and so will I.

As I learn to treat my elephant better, I developed a simple, plain-text work system to govern my behavior throughout the day. It helps me lead my elephant to places that matter.

How do you treat your elephant? Do you have any advice on how to be kinder to yourself? Please let me know via email or in the comments below.

This cycle did two things to me. One, it made my excellent under pressure. I can perform Herculean tasks with extreme focus in order to meet a shortly approaching deadline, as I have trained myself and my elephant to perform this way since elementary school.

Two, knowing that I could likely accomplish the task satisfactorily shortly before the deadline, combined with my painful inability to complete tasks when not under pressure, made it impossible to do anything that wasn’t forced.

Because of my ability to complete things last-minute, I have always been able to accomplish things that make it seem like I have my life together. ↩︎
The tragedy is that, instead of being able to congratulate myself for things I did and accomplished, I was only able to recover from the hell required to complete the task. There was no satisfaction in what I had done, only dread of what was to come. ↩︎
My wife and I do a twice-weekly “state of the union.” This practice has done wonders for us and I highly recommend it. We do the following:
- budget
- discuss upcoming events, make sure the other is available, etc.
- discuss the state of our marriage, what could be improved, things we could do for each other, etc.
↩︎

Read more and join the conversation at https://blakeashleyjr.com/posts/elephant-my-plaintext-work-system/

Whether You Like Him or Not, Tucker's Message Fiasco Should Be the Wakeup Call You Need to Encrypt and Auto-delete Your Messages

Fri, 12 May 2023 09:32:56 -0700

Tucker Carlson Tonight was the most popular primetime news show in the US from April 2020 until the shows sudden cancelation on April 24, 2023. Carlson was suddenly fired due in large part to text messages that were likely to come out if the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit were to go to trial, causing the Fox board to pay nearly $800M to settle the case. They were leaked anyway.

His messages were unacceptable, and I would have fired him for them without thinking twice. At the same time, it made me think about how I would feel about having every message, email, or photo I have ever sent scrutinized by a team of lawyers intent on destroying me and then leaked on the internet. That would not be fun.

I have made good progress moving most of my friends and family over to the encrypted messenger app, Signal. While I personally would prefer not to have my account tied to a phone number, I am willing to compromise for the ease with which normal people can sign up.¹

Signal is end-to-end encrypted, which will stop meddling intermediaries from spying on the content of your messages, including the people behind Signal and likely the government itself. That is great, and it is the primary reason I use the app. No one should be able to read my messages except the intended recipient.

That is all well and good, but if the government shows up with a search warrant or subpoena for that content of your phone, you are likely screwed. While you may be able to technically keep the government out via full-disk encryption, the real-world penalties for doing so will likely be painful. This is where disappearing messages come in. Judges and others are aware of the potential of these features to hide potentially damaging evidence. The judge in the Sam Bankman-Fried case, for example, ordered SBF to stop using Signal because of its ability to auto-delete messages.

With Signal, you can set a time limit for messages, after which, they will be deleted from the device of all parties. As the helpdesk article warns, this is not intended for protection against the recipient of the message, but for people coming along later and looking through the phone. This would have likely prevented those messages from being read in court years later (unless the other party screenshots them).

My wife and I have used Signal for years now for all of our digital communication. We also auto-delete our messages. Not once have I regretted auto-deleting. I save any fun or relevant info in my notes and download any photos I want to keep. Everything else goes away. I do the same for other chats with friends and co-workers.

Now is your chance to take stock of your digital life and the footprint you leave behind. Think twice before sending a message, even over Signal. You will likely not be able to predict when you will be sued, investigated, or otherwise thrown into the lime-light.

While I like Signal, especially when communicating with normal, non-techie folks, there is plenty of game in town. See the Privacy Guides list of private and secure messenger software. I personally like Simplex for communication with strangers, as I would rather not hand out a phone number. Reach out to me via the link in my signature to try it out! ↩︎

John Wick's Bulletproof Suit Makes the Series More Believable, Not Less

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 19:15:27 -0700

John Wick 4 is bigger, better, badder than any other fighting-focused action movie, ever. It improves on the earlier installments with its creativity, scale, and precision. Of course, I am only talking about the fighting. The plot was relatively weak, as it was in the others, but man was the fighting good. The people who said it was too long were wrong.

In John Wick 4, nearly every character, no matter how insignificant, wears a bullet-proof suit. As best I can tell, these suits are still mostly science-fiction¹² (please correct me in the comments if you know better.) When the suit was introduced in the second installment, it was a simple plot device to keep us from rolling our eyes everytime John came out of a fight magically unscathed by a storm of bullets. By the fourth movie, it has transformed the entire fighting dynamic to allow for a new, more belivable fighting style that requires more martial arts than bullet-dodging.

When John Wick was released in 2014, it became an immediate classic, and my favorite action movie. While the plot made little sense, the film established an interesting lore that was enough not to distract from the main attraction: Keanu killing hoards of thugs in near-constant hand-to-hand combat. Unlike most action movies, John Wick didn’t use any tricks to distract the viewer from the fights. No shaking camera. No sketchy cuts. No seeing the back of a stuntman’s head in the middle of a fight.

John Wick had a problem though, a problem most action movies face. People are not bulletproof. Unless the hero is superhuman, they cannot be shot repeatedly and walk away, at least believably. Most movies solve this problem unconvincingly, by having the hero luckily dodge bullets throughout the entire movie. Minor characters and even side-kicks will die along the away, but the hero will not be mortally shot in a gunfight.

This lowers the stakes for the viewer. I know the hero will not die, especially in the first 95% of the movie, so I lose the suspense. Combine that with a shakey camera and unconvincing fighting, and I am snoozing.

The John Wick franchise goes a different direction. Everyone knows that John Wick is not going to be shot dead in the middle of a fight with some grunt 20 minutes into the movie, so there is no need to pretend there is any chance of that happening. Instead, the franchise introduces bullet-proof suits in the second movie, and they are presented rather convincingly.

At first, this suit is reserved for John Wick and other high-level foes, but the regular folk are cut down via gunshot on a regular basis. This is true throughout the second and third installments. In the fourth, however, even the generic henchmen have bullet-proof suits.

While it took me aback at first, I must admit, I quickly became to appreciate the move as genius. No more generic bullet-dodging firefights. Now the rule is simple: put the bullet in the dude’s head. That’s the only way. This forces the characters to get close to each other in order to score a kill. Otherwise, they would back up and keep shooting at each other until one gets hit, like most movies.

Instead, we get nearly 3 hours of a new kind of martial arts, that usually involes rolling, wrestling, punching, or kicking until one guy points his gun at the other’s head and pulls the trigger.

P.S. – My favorite John Wick scene.

There is a recent Youtube video that details an attempt to build a bullet-proof suit that I enjoyed. ↩︎
There are also companies that purport to sell bullet-proof suits, but their claims are unsubstantiated. ↩︎

Read more and join the conversation at https://blakeashleyjr.com/posts/john-wicks-suit-makes-the-series-more-believable/

Why I Didn't Choose WordPress For My Blog, Despite Being a WordPress Pro

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 13:29:35 -0700

I have made a career out of WordPress. I am personally responsible for the security, stability, and updates of 500+ active WordPress installations (not including the few multi-sites.) Collectively, they receive hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per day.

I have grown to love WordPress over the years, wholeheartedly recommending it to friends, family, and clients for all sorts of use-cases, and I don’t regret it. WordPress is the closest thing we have to an open website Swiss army knife. It can do pretty much anything you need from a website just fine.

Because it is opensource, it is so much better than any of the proprietary hosted alernatives. SquareSpace or Wix could jack their prices at any moment. Meanwhile, I could have a fleet of WordPress sites up on a different host within the hour.

WordPress is also relatively easy to grasp by everyday people. People who do normal work can be quickly trained on how to make posts and edit pages. This is advantageous for the developer who doesn’t want to get called every time a post needs to go up, and for the user, who just wants to get back to their regular job.

That being said, if the operator knows what they are doing, WordPress is overkill for most sites, especially informational sites and personal blogs. That is coming from a guy who has used WordPress every day for over 10 years.

And so, I decided to go a different direction for my personal blog: Hugo, a fast, fun, simple static site generator and CMS (content management system) written in Go.

I outline my reasons in more detail below:

WordPress’s greatest strength and fatal flaw: The plugin and theme ecosystem

Too much flexibility

I can’t quite put my finger on what is wrong with the WordPress plugin and theme ecosystem. On paper, it is the best there is (perhaps of any project). There is a WordPress plugin for everything. I once built a hotel booking system all inside WordPress, and I still bring it up in confession from time to time.

It’s that flexiblity that can often lead to problems. WordPress can easily be twisted into unrecognizable Frankensteins. WordPress should not be used as forum software. WordPress should not be used as hotel booking software. WordPress (probably) shouldn’t be used for anything but small E-Commerce builds. Sure, the operator bears a good portion of the responsiblity for installing these plugins, but it is hard for people to draw the line when they don’t think about these things all day long.

It is clear these popular, expensive, and purpose-transforming plugins have pushed the development of WordPress towards this jack-of-all-trades software we have today. What started as hyper-focused blogging software, has become a bloated site-builder, capable of anything, good at nothing.¹

Too much commercialization

While I am not against commercialization of software in general, there is something quite tiring and even icky about the WordPress ecosystem’s relationship with its revenue. Do not get me wrong. There are hundreds of excellent, professionally developed plugins and themes out there that deserve to be compensated for their labor.

Unfortunately, this quickly leads to ads, upsells, annoying banners, strategically limited functionality, etc. Unbiased analysis of WordPress plugins and themes are difficult if not impossible to come by because of the aggressive affilate marketing of the key players. Some hosts offer hundreds of dollars per conversion to a hosting plan.

While I understand, again, I miss the opensource-focused spirit of the early days. When users were creating websites mostly for themselves, their friends, or their clubs and would release those improvements back to the community.

Hugo seems to have that spirit to me. Themes (including this one) are abundant and available under permissive opensource lisenses. Though it is quite a mature project, it feels like you are on the ground floor of something.

The root of all WordPress pain: the database

It’s finicky

This is the root of most of the complaints that will follow. WordPress requires a database. This allows for the great breadth of its functionality, stores comments, allows for complex plugins to accomplish bascially anything. It also introduces an order of magnatitude more complexity to the maintence of the site and its environment.

You probably just want to get a site and a few posts up. Now you have to worry about the database, backing it up, what effect changes will have on it, etc. It can also cause downtime or content freezes when switching environments or performing updates.

Instead, Hugo and other static CMSs treat content as a file, stored on your hard drive and in git. While this does limit the breadth of its possible functionality, it is a much better way to handle 95% of what websites and blogs need to do: display text and images to the user.

Those files can now be managed through any process that the author sees fit. Because content can now be easily tracked in git, it allows for natural version control and collaboration. Version controlling content on WordPress is difficult and efforts to track WordPress content using git (or git-like systems) have been regretably abandoned.²

The content is no longer tied to the platform. I can write the content for this blog using any software that can handle Markdown. While WordPress is opensource, unlocking content from the WordPress database requires expertise and time. Meanwhile, if I want to move my content off of Hugo, I simply copy some markdown files.

It also simplifies migration and backup strategies. I’ve got all my Hugo content stored as Markdown files in git, on a flash drive, and anywhere else I choose. My content is in a format that is exteremly interoperable.

It is (often) slow

Because WordPress is dynamic, it is slow. Everytime a user loads a page, at least most of the time, a call goes out to an SQL database. Without careful planning and tuning, this will quickly cause performance problems.

WordPress users must become experts on a half-dozen forms of caching, possibly purchase expensive performance plugins, and set up a CDN in order to provide reasonable service to their visitors.

Common WordPress plugins can cause massive performance pains in ways that are difficult to understand for professionals, likely impossible for everyday people.

Meanwhile, serving a file is as performant as it gets. That’s what Hugo does, it combines everything into a single (or at most, a few) files and delivers them as soon as the request is received from the visitor’s browser. There are no dynamic requests, which makes Hugo static.

Being static makes Hugo much easier to spread around via a CDN, because the site doesn’t rely on a database and can be scaled horizontally without any issues. Hugo can even be served via s3 for a few pennies a month (depending upon the traffic).

This static approach comes with major drawbacks though. That database, as it turns out, is pretty useful. It stores comments, user accounts, and other convient things. On Hugo, if you want to do much more than display some text or images, you’ll need to embed an external, often costly, or privacy-invading service on your page. You can always choose to self-host alternatives, but now you are dealing with a whole other can of worms.

WordPress treats writing as a second class citizen

I am saddened by the state of the WordPress editor. While Gutenberg is okay for basic pages, anything beyond simple columnar layouts quickly becomes overwhelming and unmanagable. The designers have chosen a flashy design over simplicity and clear presentation of the layout.

There are other WordPress editors out there. They all have major drawbacks, by definition, however, because they are all walled gardens. Want to switch editors? You’re starting over. They also add bloat to your site.

I have used Elementor since it first came out, and it is more powerful and much better at handling complex layouts. Elementor, unfortunately, starts at $59 per year per site (with discounts the more you purchase), which quickly kicks it out of the budget of many projects and approaches the cost of WordPress’s hosted competitors.

Worst of all, Gutenberg makes it a pain to write. Each paragraph is treated like a block (similar to Notion). This makes it relatively easy to embed a YouTube video or Tweet between your text, but writing is overly clunky. For me, writing posts in Gutenberg consists of pasting in Markdown from a real editor and going through each paragraph seperating them out into their own blocks.

This is especially tragic considering WordPress’s beginnings and stated purpose: a blogging platform. How can you blog if writing sucks?

Conclusion

I have a tricky relationship with WordPress. On the one hand, it is one of the most successful open-source projects of all time, running half the websites on the planet and making website administration accessible to everyday people. On the other, it is a clunky behemoth that has lost its way. When it is not down due to a database issue, failed update, or other issue, you are wrestling with performance issues or chopping off your left arm to purchase a new plugin.

Sure, Hugo can’t do everything I could want a website to do, but that is the magic. It forces me to stay on target. Instead of tuning performance and wrestling settings, I can get back to writing.

Blogging isn’t what it used to be, so I understand why Automattic (the corporate sponsor and maintainer of WordPress that offers the most popular WordPress hosting) has guided WordPress towards the more marketable generalist space. ↩︎
I am speaking here about efforts to track WordPress content in git, such as VersionPress, but there are mildly complicated ways to track WordPress plugins and themes via git, such as a composer workflow or plugins like WP-Pusher. ↩︎

Read more and join the conversation at https://blakeashleyjr.com/posts/why-i-didnt-choose-wordpress/

Blake Ashley Jr.

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WordPress’s greatest strength and fatal flaw: The plugin and theme ecosystem

Too much flexibility

Too much commercialization

The root of all WordPress pain: the database

It’s finicky

It is (often) slow

WordPress treats writing as a second class citizen

Conclusion