(Hello, world—yet again!)
In 2023, I thought it’d make a fun project to migrate this blog from self-hosted WordPress to one or another static site generator, and I began playing with Pelican. Pelican is written in Python, claims to import WordPress posts, and has several themes available. I wasn’t sure yet how the rendered content would be served—perhaps via GitHub Pages, though it wasn’t my favorite idea—and I didn’t love Pelican’s restriction of one category label per post.
In 2023, coincidentally, I learned that typing on a standard laptop keyboard increases pain significantly, in ways that did not occur before 2020. In 2024, I learned that the standard treatments that an experienced occupational therapist could apply against pain had the unfortunate effect of worsening my pain temporarily; I was glad also to gain a few helpful ring splints.
The Pelican importer (2023 vintage) relied on Pandoc to generate its reStructuredText. It yielded reasonable Markdown-ish output for about half my WordPress content, mangled about 25%, and dropped the remaining 20%. That’s unsatisfying yet better than I could’ve done, given my minimal familiarity with WordPress internals.
Because I have a bit of prior familiarity with converting other types of structured text and validating it for accuracy (i.e., because I did it professionally for two decades), in August 2025 I began fixing up the importer’s output a few posts at a time in VS Code, which became an easy way of learning Quarto’s basic features.
This Quarto instance uses the Sandstone theme, chosen from BootSwatch. It does not contain every WordPress post formerly available via reqfd.net/blog, but then, neither did the most recent WordPress instance. Over time, some posts have been retired for various reasons. Posts are stored in a git repository, and their rendered versions are pushed likewise to it from my laptop. If I blog more than once or twice per year here, maybe setting up a CI solution will become worth the maintenance load.