Reading back over some old posts, I realised that the voice inside my head – the one that tells me that I'm not good enough – cropped up more often than I'd like.
When I first started working on my custom overlay for WordPress it told me that I wouldn't be able to build my own system from scratch.
When I did build my own system it told me that I wouldn't be able to migrate the Journal and muse-letter over.
After I successfully migrated the Journal and muse-letter it told me that I had better give up all hope of migrating the Digital Garden – way too hard, way too much work.
When I migrated the Garden it said I should stop, there was no way I'd manage to eradicate WordPress completely. It was too hard to get the old posts over, stop kidding myself I could even contemplate it.
Well, screw you voice inside my head!
I've taken a massive step to completely removing my requirements for a WordPress install and created an archive page that pulls posts from the WordPress table, displaying them a day at a time, just like the rest of the site. Here's the first day with a post from the WordPress posts table – back when I used to be enthusiastic about social media.
I didn't need to migrate the posts into the new system (that would have been a logistical nightmare) just build a way to retrieve them from where they already were.
I need to do a little bit of tweaking and also introduce an extra loop to pull in comments but it works nicely. I had to account for the switchover from using the native WordPress functionality to when I started using my overlay – the primary issue was switching from reverse chronological order to chronological, but I also had to get clever with post titles.
Once the page is complete I'll be able to completely remove WordPress, all I need are the tables and images.