Now I totally understand why personal blogs aren’t a thing any more and why Medium, Substack, etc grew so fast.
- Setup PHP to run on IIS, which it doesn’t really want to do
- Edit PHP conf files to enable a laundry list of sublibraries (which are probably 50kb of code total btw and should just be auto-included) required by WordPress
- Setup SSL (this has gotten worse and worse)
- Figure out how you are going to auto-renew SSL (this is a thing now apparently)
- Setup the basic ability to send email (this used to be a standard feature of IIS, but in the modern web ecosystem has become incredibly complicated)
- All WordPress plugins seem to be bloatware with built-in upsells. Since plugins are arbitrary PHP code snippets they can do annoying things like put nag screens into your WP dashboard.
