Spoiler alert: he’s back!
TL;DR - if I haven’t replied to your support email, please post again here in forum!
Sorry all, I’ve been out of action for some weeks now. At first, I was still replying to support questions, but the coding had dropped off. Then all computer usage stopped, besides a few replies on Telegram.
I was in a bit of a “funk”. I can only speculate as the clinical definition of whatever throws me out work mode like this, but I do know it’s been a recurring problem for me. I had a great month or so of productivity and headway on several open source projects, then nothing at all.
I’d much prefer to work on fixing bugs in my code than in my mind, I still haven’t documented this mind bug properly to start working on a fix, but I’ve made a few environmental changes to hopefully mitigate recurring incidents.
The main thing, is I seem to be back in action from tonight, finally typing away at the keyboard and feeling good.
I’ve got an email backlog I may not get through properly, but will reply to those users with a link to this post. If your issue still persists, please create a new forum post on this site, as I’ll be moving solely to forum/community based support as soon as possible and tend to provide better answers here, where I know more than 1 user will benefit from my time replying.
Project updates
So, picking up where things left off before I went AWOL:
- WP2Static version 6 (what’s on wp.org currently) is shifting to Static HTML Output, with a very nice build available here: https://github.com/WP2Static/static-html-output-plugin/releases/tag/6.6.21 That fixes a LOT of bugs people have been dealing with for years
- A full rewrite/rearchitecture of WP2Static will continue under the same name, this is the current Core plugin and add-ons at https://github.com/WP2Static/wp2static - it’s going to be receiving a lot of the detection and rewriting benefits that have gotten into Static HTML Output 6.6.21, but also have some powerful and unique features.
As these 2 projects stand today, I’d say WP2Static is more developer-friendly, with Static HTML Output producing the best results with least effort. They’ll continue to be developed in their own roadmaps.
There is also SimplerStatic, an updated fork of Simply Static plugin, which has some other advantages that may help crawl some sites, but with less bells and whistles.
Some aspects of these plugins may merge again in the future, as I get feedback from users as to what features are working best for them.
A few other projects started this year that will continue to develop:
- Lokl (https://lokl.dev) I’m quite fond of this one, it’s a Docker based setup for local WordPress development. A bunch of improvements in the back of mind/GitHub Issues list to implement, then I’ll put the word out more. I’ve seen a few early adopters trying it out, which is cool/daunting at the same time
- Appish (https://appi.sh) - another weekend’s work (most of that just fumbling with CSS for the website!), with suprising number of people using it successfully, including myself when I need to do quick site static conversions
- https://perfwars.net - maybe a cpl weekends work around New Year’s Eve, it’s at about 75% MVP functionality and 5% acceptable UI - a handy tool for measuring/tracking site performance of your own/competitor’s sites, looking fwd to polishing that up, as most of the hard work is done (I tend to prefer the hard, interesting work than the “finishing up” part, as many of you are coming to see!)
There may be some more projects I’ve forgotten. While I was in my funk, I bought a bunch of domains and a few content sites off a friend, thinking that I should actually build some websites to not fall out of touch. One thing that was reinforced to me - I really don’t like developing sites using WordPress! May sound crazy, as I spend so much time in WordPress, developing plugins for it, debugging issues, etc, but personally, I love to work in the command line and with portability and minimal tooling, so I keep going back to Hugo as my preferred static site generator.
Big push for video tutorials
With some very exciting releases coming up and the need for showing how to use these still not so intuitive programs, I’ve been setting up a little area at home in preparation to produce some tutorial videos, especially for the WP2Static family of products. All parts of the screen recording setup look to be in order now. I’m limiting to 1080p resolution, as that’s what most of my equipment maxes out at and the most important thing is that I start producing these screencasts/tutorials, not letting 4k stand in the way of good.
Apologies again for not answering some support questions you threw at me in last few weeks and looking forward to delivering you some nicer software soon!
Cheers,
Leon
But also glad to know you’re sleeping better at night, with less WP sites vulnerable or hosting companies extorting to upgrade when hitting resource limits!