The Future of Oblivion

I'm planning to take my blog offline and replace it with a much smaller site soon. Do not be alarmed—well, no more alarmed than otherwise merited by the current state of the world, anyway. It's more of a software issue than one of dystopian politics.

This website is built on Drupal 7, an ancient version of an open-source content management system.¹. The software maintainers will cease providing updates for Drupal 7 on January 5th, 2025.² This means they will no longer patch security issues or keep the codebase compatible with future changes to the programming languages it's coded in. Without these routine security and maintenance updates, the site will soon be hacked or stop working when the underlying server software is updated.

Every major release version³ of Drupal is significantly different from the last, even when the maintainers promise it won't be. As a result, the site can't be updated from this very old version 7 to the current version 11 with just a few clicks and some patience like you're used to doing with things like web browsers or your operating system. No, I would have to rebuild the entire place almost from scratch.

My professional career has found me focusing on entirely different technologies for many years since I first created this iteration of the site. A Drupal 11 rebuild would involve a lot of study and effort to learn an updated tech stack that I'm not interested in nor professionally invested in knowing anything about, and I wouldn't have the time or energy even if I were.⁴ Eventually, I hope to manage the blog using a static site generator like Hugo⁵ or 11ty⁶, but that will also require a great deal of work, and this blog is sitting pretty low on the list of projects I have mind for the near future.

I don't have a date planned yet, but as chance may have it, the shutdown will likely happen in early January. The timing is a coincidence and not necessarily related to the elections. I may shut it down before then if a major security vulnerability is announced between now and the New Year.

It's been fun. Hopefully, it will be fun again someday.