diditho.com

The challenge

A blog that has been online since 2005 collects a lot: essays in Indonesian, developer notes in English, travel and mountain-bike stories, files to download and plenty of code. Twenty years on, all of it has to stay pleasant to read and easy to find — and the site has to look after itself, so that writing remains the only job.

Our solution

We run it on WordPress, set up for a single writer and a long archive:

• A theme made for reading — Readme, with large serif type, one column of posts and a quiet sidebar for the author’s portrait, search and recent comments.
• Twenty years, still findable — nearly 30 categories, monthly archives back to 2005, search, and related posts at the end of every article.
• Developer notes that are easy to use — syntax-highlighted code blocks, tables, and files served through a downloads page.
• Our own plugin — the Most commented posts list in the sidebar comes from Simple Most Commented Post, a small widget we wrote and published on GitHub under the GPLv3.
• Search and security — Yoast SEO and Google Site Kit for Search Console and Analytics, Akismet against comment spam, login rate limiting, and Cloudflare in front of the site.

The outcome

diditho.com has grown to 288 posts over 21 years. More than 130 of them are developer notes, from a 2007 post on SharpMap, a .NET GIS library, to 2026 guides for MongoDB 8 on Debian and upgrading Wazuh on Ubuntu. And one feature built for the blog, the most-commented widget, is now an open-source plugin anyone can install.