In 1999, GeoCities sorted the web into neighborhoods, and it filed me under Area51, the district for science fiction. I used my plot of science-fiction real estate to publish an About Me page. It had a guestbook nobody signed, a hit counter I inflated myself, and an Under Construction GIF that told the truth: it was never finished. I built it by hand, tag by tag, in raw HTML. I was ridiculously proud of it.
That page is long gone. But stay with me for the next thirty years of website migrations, because the story ends somewhere I did not expect: exactly where it started.
The long way home
First I was a reader. The blogspot era washed over me and I never owned one; I just lurked in other people’s comment sections. I got a Tumblr because everyone alive at the time got a Tumblr, and I cannot tell you a single thing I posted on it. I tried Medium and gave up within weeks. Platforms I visited. Never homes.
In 2010 I did the serious thing: my own domain, self-hosted WordPress, a proper blog. A database, an admin panel, themes, plugins. Everything I have written since lives at that domain, and that part never changed. Everything underneath it did.
WordPress was a real home. Real homes demand tending. The tending had a rhythm: log in, find the orange banner, update the plugins before one of them became the hole somebody crawls in through. Update the theme. Update WordPress itself. Then update the plugins the update broke. None of this was writing. All of it was mandatory.
Around 2019 I moved to Ghost, the minimalist blogging platform built on Node.js, which at the time was the cool new kid. Lighter, cleaner, nothing but writing. It was better. It was also a server in a data center that I paid twenty-odd dollars a month to babysit: version upgrades, SSL renewals, a database backup I never once tested. The tending had not gone away. It had moved.
Five platforms, one motive. Every migration I ever made was chasing the same thing: less time tending the website, more time writing on it. No platform ever delivered. Each one just relocated the chores.
The webmaster comes back
This month I moved the site one more time, and the destination was familiar. waihongfong.com is now a folder of files in a git repository. Posts are plain text. The pages are static HTML, built and pushed to the edge of the internet. The hosting bill is zero dollars. Publishing looks like this:
$ git push
$ npm run deploy
✓ share cards generated (54 posts)
✓ built in 1.2s
✓ deployed to waihongfong.comOn paper that is the same setup as 1999: hand me a folder of HTML files and put them on the internet. The difference is that in 1999 the folder was tended by a teenager with a book about HTML, and in 2026 it is tended by an AI.
I did not replace WordPress with a better product. I replaced it with a colleague.
The colleague is Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI agent that lives in the terminal. It is the webmaster now. When I publish, it generates the share card, builds the site, deploys it, then loads the live page and checks the layout at phone width before telling me we are done. When a link breaks, I do not search for a plugin; I type “the link on the homepage is broken” and it is fixed and deployed before I finish my coffee. When I migrated sixteen years of posts off Ghost, the colleague did the migration, found the dead images, and kept a log of the seven it could not save.
Here is the part I find funny. In 1999, every page on the internet had a line at the bottom: “email the webmaster.” Webmaster was a real job, and then the CMS era killed the title and we all laughed at the word. But the job never left. I was doing it unpaid at midnight every time WordPress showed me the orange banner. The job did not disappear until this year, when it finally got automated. The webmaster is back. It just is not human.
Own your words
There is a darker thread running through those thirty years.
GeoCities closed in October 2009 and deleted roughly 38 million pages, mine included. The first things most of my generation ever built on the internet are simply gone. Tumblr went the other way: Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for it in 2013, and six years later it was sold for about $3 million to Automattic, the company behind WordPress. The must-have platform of its decade lost 99.7 percent of its value, and the dying bought the dead.
My fifty-four posts crossed four platforms and arrived intact. Not because any platform protected them, but because I owned them the whole way: my domain, my files, my export the moment things got weird. Now that ownership is literal. The repository is the website. A platform is a landlord. A folder of files is a freehold.
If you built one of those hand-rolled GeoCities pages, your instinct back then was correct, and the industry spent twenty-five years talking you out of it. And if your writing currently lives on someone else’s platform, the move home is no longer a lost weekend of exports and regret: hand the migration to an AI agent and it is an afternoon. The bookkeeping is delegable now. The ownership is not.
This essay went live with one git push. The colleague generated the card, checked the layout, and confirmed the page resolves. Nobody updated a plugin.
WordPress is not dead because something better came along. It is dead because its job is.