Sometimes the best way forward is to go back to your roots. After 24 years of web hosting adventures - from the wild west days of Geocities to premium shared hosting - I'm taking a step that feels both nostalgic and revolutionary: moving to GitHub Pages.
This isn't just a hosting migration. It's a return to the hands-on, build-it-yourself ethos that got me excited about the web in the first place. When I first started building websites in 1996, every line of HTML was intentional, every image was optimized by necessity, and understanding how things worked wasn't optional - it was survival.
Fast-forward to 2020, and I find myself craving that same level of control and understanding. GitHub Pages offers something rare in today's web landscape: simplicity without sacrifice, power without complexity.
The Journey So Far
Let me take you on a quick tour of this site's evolution, because it's also the story of how web development has changed over the past quarter-century.
The Geocities Era (1996-2001)
Back when the web was young and optimistic, I carved out my little corner of digital real estate on Geocities. If you weren't there for it, imagine today's social media but with more creative freedom and significantly worse design choices. Animated GIFs weren't ironic - they were cutting-edge.
Building a website then meant hand-coding HTML in Notepad, uploading files via FTP, and hoping your visitor counter widget actually worked. Every kilobyte mattered when your users were on dial-up, and "responsive design" meant making sure your page didn't break on both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
It was primitive by today's standards, but there was something pure about it. You built what you needed, no more, no less. If you wanted a contact form, you learned CGI scripting. If you wanted dynamic content, you figured out server-side includes. The barrier between content creator and web developer was essentially non-existent.
The Dreamhost Years (2005-2020)
After the dot-com crash took Geocities with it, I migrated to Dreamhost - a decision that would define my hosting strategy for the next 15 years. Dreamhost offered something revolutionary for its time: affordable shared hosting with actual technical control.
This era coincided with the explosion of content management systems. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla promised to democratize web publishing, and they largely delivered. Suddenly, you could have a professional-looking blog without touching a line of code.
But as the web matured, so did its complexity. What started as simple shared hosting evolved into a maze of databases, plugin dependencies, security updates, and performance optimization challenges. Managing a WordPress site went from "install and forget" to "constant vigilance against hackers, spam, and plugin conflicts."
Don't get me wrong - Dreamhost served me well. Their support was solid, uptime was reliable, and the price was reasonable. But over time, I found myself spending more energy managing the hosting infrastructure than creating content. The tools that were supposed to simplify web publishing had become the main source of complexity.
The Static Site Renaissance
Somewhere around 2018, I started paying attention to the static site generator movement. Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby - these tools promised to bring back the simplicity of static HTML while maintaining modern development workflows.
The appeal was immediate: no databases to secure, no servers to patch, no plugins to update. Just content, markup, and deployment. Fast loading times, bulletproof security, and hosting costs that rounded to zero.
But more than the technical benefits, static sites represented a philosophical shift back to owning your content and controlling your tools. When everything is stored in markdown files in a Git repository, you're not locked into any particular platform or provider. Your content is portable, versionable, and future-proof.
Why GitHub Pages Now?
The decision to migrate to GitHub Pages wasn't just about cost savings, though those are significant. Moving from $10/month hosting to free hosting is nice, but the real value proposition is much deeper.
Simplicity That Scales
GitHub Pages removes almost every moving part from web hosting. No server administration, no database management, no security patches. Push content to a repository, and it's automatically deployed. The complexity of modern web hosting distilled down to its essence: content and delivery.
This simplicity doesn't come with limitations that matter for a personal blog. SSL certificates are handled automatically. CDN distribution is built-in. Custom domains work seamlessly. The platform handles everything I need without anything I don't.
Developer Experience That Actually Works
As someone who spends most of my day in Git workflows anyway, having my website content follow the same patterns feels natural. Write a blog post in markdown, commit it to the repository, and it's live. The same branching, merging, and review processes that work for code work perfectly for content.
The local development story is equally smooth. Clone the repository, run the development server, and you have an exact replica of the production site running locally. Make changes, see them immediately, test everything before deploying. It's the kind of workflow that just makes sense.
Content as Code
Treating blog posts as code files opens up possibilities that traditional CMSs make difficult. Want to bulk update all posts with a certain tag? Write a script. Need to generate a sitemap or RSS feed? It's just another build step. Want to analyze your writing patterns over time? Your content is already structured data.
This approach also makes backup and migration trivial. The entire site exists as a Git repository that can be cloned to any machine or hosting provider. No database exports, no file transfers, no plugin compatibility issues. True portability.
Performance by Default
Static sites are fast by definition, but GitHub Pages takes it further. The global CDN ensures content loads quickly regardless of visitor location. The absence of database queries or server-side processing eliminates the most common performance bottlenecks.
Page load times that used to require caching plugins and optimization wizardry now happen automatically. When your site is just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript served from a CDN, performance becomes a solved problem rather than an ongoing challenge.
The Migration Process
Moving 20+ years of content isn't trivial, but it's more straightforward than I initially expected. The biggest challenge isn't technical - it's editorial. Looking through decades of blog posts, deciding what's worth preserving and what can be archived, has been both nostalgic and slightly embarrassing.
Some posts from 2003 haven't aged well. Others remain surprisingly relevant. A few make me wonder what I was thinking when I hit publish. All of them represent a moment in time, a snapshot of who I was and what I was thinking about.
Rather than migrating everything at once, I'm taking a curated approach. The best content gets refreshed and republished. The rest gets archived but remains accessible for anyone curious about the archaeological layers of a developer's digital evolution.
What This Means Going Forward
This migration represents more than a hosting change - it's a commitment to a more intentional approach to content creation. No more posting for the sake of posting. No more battling with CMS quirks instead of focusing on writing. Just thoughts, carefully crafted and deliberately shared.
The technical barrier is higher than WordPress, but not prohibitively so. Writing in markdown encourages better structure. Version control enables better editing workflows. The deployment process creates natural checkpoints for review and reflection.
Most importantly, this setup aligns with how I actually work. The same tools I use for development now power my writing. The same attention to craft that goes into code can now extend to content. It's a unification that feels both efficient and authentic.
Welcome to the Show (Again)
If you're still reading, welcome to this latest iteration of risadams.com. The technology has changed, but the mission remains the same: sharing thoughts on development, career growth, and the intersection of technology and life.
You'll find insights from my journey as a developer, Scrum Master, and reluctant expert in work-life balance. Expect practical advice without the fluff, technical deep-dives that focus on real-world applications, and occasional philosophical musings on what it means to build a sustainable career in technology.
The content system is simpler now, the design is cleaner, and the focus is sharper. What hasn't changed is the commitment to authenticity and usefulness. Every post should teach you something, make you think, or solve a problem you're facing.
The new dawn isn't just about new technology - it's about renewed focus on what matters: creating content that's worth your time to read and mine to write.
Thanks for joining me on this next chapter. The best is yet to come.
