PHP2Shell and the case for building boring sites

From Wednesday 21 October to the end of the weekend, I was patching an old VPS and moving a handful of sites onto a new one. PHP2Shell finally made the decision for me. This blog carried on regardless, because it’s just files. The sites I’d built with a CMS were another story. I was a WordPress person long before I was a static site person. It ran my blog, and then a number of pub and company websites I built over the years as Marmalade & Jam. I never used off-the-shelf themes. I built everything custom, but the plugins were great and the editor was a lovely UI for content creation, especially for clients. By 2015 I was tracking which sites were behind on updates in a Google spreadsheet, which tells you how well that scaled. My own blog had already escaped by then, though. In 2012 I moved this blog to Jekyll on GitHub Pages. It wasn’t really a security decision. I wanted my posts as plain files in a repo instead of rows in a database on a server I had to babysit, and at the time it…