Bypass the tech arms race with a notebook

Grab an old notebook and be yourself.

OpeAI is now responsible for a RAM shortage that looks like it could continue into 2027. Computers already cost more due to tariffs. NVIDIA and other GPU manufacturers are making year over year record profits. Apple, Google and others saw this coming and began producing their own CPUs with integrated graphics to manage supply, reduce reliance on third parties and protect their revenue.

Well, you don’t need all that. You can grab an old notebook, that one gathering dust on a shelf, and blog on paper, for your eyes and perhaps if you desire snap a photo and upload it as a post to your own blog. Running on your own old server, maybe that old laptop, maybe a web host, like this one running ClassicPress, WordPress, Drupal or whatever you like.

For this post I chose to quickly transcribe it on my eight year old laptop, post it to my blog, free of an algorithm. No invasive ads and data collection, no endless scroll of clickbait. But you, you don’t need to be part of the wasteful tech arms race of 2026. You can think for yourself, and write something in a notebook, keep it private or post it online too.

Reflections on a year of using ClassicPress

Last December, I migrated from WordPress to ClassicPress. Matt Mullenweg was shattering the once vibrant community with every post and interview, and at the peak it seemed his noisy irrelevant rants and gatekeeping by withholding services from people he disagreed with arrived almost daily.

ClassicPress offers an alternative for projects that don’t benefit from from full-site-editing and the block editor. ClassicPress launched in August of 2018, with the intention of continuing a lightweight content management experience predictable for content contributors, site maintainers and visitors.

Around this time I was also craving a simple platform for blogging and communicating my thoughts, free of gimmicks and feature bloat. I could just post a status update or blog post and move on with my day.

Happily my only setback was not informing my web hosting environment that I had migrated to WordPress, this led to a conflict when cPanel forced an unwanted upgrade back to WordPress. Thankfully An Honest Host, has great customer service and we worked through restoring from a recent backup and modified my install for ClassicPress preventing the problem in the future. Read the migration documentation and get ahead of any possible conflicts.

Thank you, ClassicPress, for a great 2025.

OpenGraph Support Testing

My migration to ClassicPress just a couple days old I took notice of some of the areas to customize my experience. I had an old plugin to add OpenGraph support to WordPress sitting in bitbucket that proved a good starting point.

As for the current theme I’m using ClassicSixteen, a well built clone of Twenty Sixteen, and have made notes of small adjustments to keep elements like headlines and elements consistent between templates. A simple solution will be to create a Child Theme to standardize between the two. A permanent solution would be to create my own lightweight theme using CSS Grid. Just one problem, my web developer skills have become a little dusty. 😛

Plugin in progress, no warranty or support provided: jd-opengraph.zip