Goodbye Wordpress
When I started this blog just over a year ago I made the decision to host it using my own Wordpress instance.
It was a choice that involved a lot of complexity yet failed to deliver the levels of customization I was really looking for.
I wanted something personal
At the time I decided to start the blog I knew there were several options available that would have been easier to set up. blogger was an option, as was wordpress.com. Both offered a limited number of unimpressive, dirt common themes built for the riff raff. I decided that these options were too impersonal, too lacking in creativity. I wanted something I could customize, so I went with a custom wordpress install.
It was harder than I thought
I installed Wordpress on a brand new ubuntu vps server. This of course meant that I was responsible for installing a database, a mail server, a web server and Wordpress. It’s not that these tasks are especially difficult, but if they aren’t something you do a lot you end up wasting a lot of time figuring out less obvious details. For example, your ip address is likely to be automatically added to a spam blacklist.
I found something easier
One day I discovered a very interesting post about a super simple, super fast blogging tool called toto. The entire project is only a few hundred lines of code which means that even my poor pea brain can actually understand it. If I can completely understand my blogging tool, I can completely customize it.
The other advantage of toto is that it is written using Ruby, which means that hosting is a piece of cake. I can just create a free account on Heroku and publish articles without needing to worry about servers or maintenance.
I decided to use it
I took the plunge and decided to switch over to toto once I had something worthwhile to post. Since that was unlikely to happen anytime soon so went ahead and did it anyway. I didn’t see much value in migrating the old posts so I just moved them and set up some permanent redirect rules.
Blogging is good again. I have a simple tool that lets me focus on my content, lets me customize it and gets out of my way. My only remaining dillema is whether I should have used tumblr instead. Ahhh well, perhaps that will make for a good post next year.