It was the summer of 2003, just weeks before I was set to move to Taiwan, that I decided to create a blog to document my journey. I had, at that point, had a GeoCities site, a Blogspot site, a site I built in Microsoft FrontPage and hosted…somewhere, so this was my fourth swing at the blog thing (it was the seventh that ended up being Stratechery). I was intrigued by a just-released piece of software that promised a five-minute install; it was called WordPress.

It did, I must confess, take me much longer than 5 minutes to install WordPress: it turned out I needed to learn how to create a MySQL database and configure PHP; once you had all of those component pieces in place, then yes, it only took 5 minutes to install!

I was thinking back to those days last week when news broke that every version of PHP had a critical bug that allowed for remote code execution on the host machine; Stratechery today still runs on WordPress, but that WordPress is managed by Pressable , an Automattic company.…