Farewell to my old WordPress site
The last time I built a website it was 2019.
Michal and I had built out our van the year before, I had just finished my contract with Roam Media to produce the Roam Awards Show. We pointed ourselves toward Mexico to climb our little hearts out for the next year. I also knew I wanted to use this time off to study, write, and grow. And I wanted to record it all on the site.
To build the site, I wanted to understand the whole thing: hosting, domains, WordPress, plugins, SEO, design, maintenance. I chose Elementor because I wanted to make things move. I took a Yoast course on search engine optimization and used my own website as a guinea pig for everything I learned.
I remember sitting at La Posada, the climbers' campground in El Potrero Chico, on a rest day, surrounded by massive limestone walls and climbers rock climbing, having a beer, or chilling with friends (not staring at a computer screen), rewriting my About page for approximately the 100th time. Who am I? How did I get here? What connects all these things I've done? What do I want to do next? Normal rest-day stuff.
I put a lot of work into that website. The whole premise was that I was a lifelong learner, and this would be where I kept a record of what I was figuring out. I made a little animated Hi, I'm Erin intro block myself. I wrote regular entries about whatever I was thinking about and called them Discoveries, basically a newsletter in blog form because I didn't want to commit to a newsletter, I think, and because I wanted site content?
About six years, a global pandemic, and a few generations of frontier models later, it's time to deprecate it. The design is dated, the copy is dated, and the WordPress/Elementor situation underneath it feels a little like opening a junk drawer in a house I used to live in. I vaguely remember why everything is in there, but I'd rather not touch any of it.
And once again, I find myself on a break from work, building a website as a way to learn new things, and taking time to inhabit my new skillsets. Except in 2019, I wanted to know how to do everything myself. In 2026, I'm learning how to hand the work off. Vibecoding, supervising agents and parallel build sessions, writing reusable skills, and writing verification steps into the process. I'm learning when to intervene and when to get out of the way. It's not only a whole new approach to building a personal website, it's a whole new way of thinking.
Claude is handling the migration from DreamHost to Cloudflare, managing my GitHub repository, implementing the design, and making changes to the code. I mostly tell it what I want, and off it goes. It's fantastic, and odd.
Case in point: while I was writing this post, I asked Claude to bring back eleven of my old blog posts from the old site, with their original publish dates and every photo. It pulled all 71 photos, rebuilt each post here on the new site, sorted them by tag, wrote captions for the 20 photos I never captioned the first time around, and proofread every post, catching more than a hundred typos I'd left behind. It took a few minutes. By hand, that would have taken me days. Pretty unreal. They're all in Writing now.
Another one: I wanted the footer of my site to say something different each time someone visits, a little rotating sign-off like "Hope you get a nice walk in today." In 2019 I wouldn't have known what that was called, let alone how to build it, or whether tucking it into a footer would break something. This time I described what I wanted, picked my favorite lines from a list of options, and Claude wrote the few lines of code that choose one at random every time a page loads, then added it to every page on the site.
The last time I built a website, I had to learn the language of the tools. This time, the tools speak mine. That feels profound. It collapses the distance between having an idea and making it real, and it also changes what it means to know how to make something.
I don't think any of us fully understands that shift yet. The internet of 2019 already feels like a different world: before a machine could take a half-baked idea, write code, test it, and keep going while I slept. The new skill isn't mastery in the old sense. It's judgment: knowing what to ask for, what to keep, what to question, and what still has to come from me.
My old website was a record of what I was learning in that world. Building the new one is one of the ways I'm learning to live in this one.