Back in college on July 9th, 2002, I registered gogorichie.com through GoDaddy. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, driven by the curiosity of owning my own slice of the internet. Little did I know that domain would become my digital home for decades of blogging, experimentation, and tech journaling.

The Breakup With WordPress

From LiveJournal to Blogspot and eventually to a self-hosted WordPress install in 2011, my blog has lived many lives. WordPress gave me ultimate flexibility. I could mold my blog into anything I wanted thanks to its massive plugin ecosystem. Over the years, I posted nearly 3000 blog entries — trust me, a lot of it was garbage — but it was mine, and I loved that freedom.

Backstory

For my website, security has always been a second-class citizen I’ve never treated it fairly outside of the basic practices of an SSL certificate and patching of the host and any plugins I might be using. I had the opportunity to join Scott Hanselman for a small group session hosted by my company and one of the things he talked about was providing server-side security and sound of mind to users. He asked the audience for someone’s website address to show security vulnerabilities so I was quick to volunteer mine I assume my website was ok I knew that I was running a Hugo static hosted website on Netlify so I wasn’t truly concerned. He pulled up the website securityheaders.com and scanned gogorichie.com needless to say I was surprised my site ranked in as a D on a grading scale of A+ to R.

First post using Hugo