New blog engine, now in beta

Or: how I wasted a week of "vacation"

Jul-27-09, 2:52 am by Hanford
File under: tech

You're reading the first official post on my new blog -- Actually, it's all the content of my old blog but running in a completely new blog engine. Yes, I decided to ditch Wordpress.

I had been thinking about dropping Wordpress for a while. I never felt fully comfortable with Wordpress. I always felt like the path to extending it was a bit more roundabout than I wanted it to be. Just a little bit more indirection (and therefore learning curve) than I wanted. Wordpress always did a good job, and I will still recommend it to others looking for a blog engine. But for me, I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into customization without having to deal with the ins and outs of WP's plugin framework*.

And then my blog got exploited by a black hat SEO script.It's completely my fault for not upgrading Wordpress, and I take full responsibility for that. But afterward, my thoughts were not "well, I gotta upgrade", but instead "Now's the time to ditch Wordpress".

So what blog engine did I switch my blog to?

I wrote my own from scratch. Not even a framework. It's straight PHP and MySQL. It was pretty straight forward, and a lot of fun, taking probably 20 to 30 hours and counting ... it's still not done!

The best part is that the end result means I am pretty much in control of every little nuance of the site. It's very basic, but at the same time I have some plans for some special features that will make it more enjoyable to read, and make it easier (and therefore more frequent) for me to post.

Beta late than never

As of this writing, the site is a beta. Things will still be changing, especially the CSS files and little details with the layout. Some things I haven't even started on, like colors of links both new and visited. It typically takes me weeks of tweaking a design before I'm happy with it, so you'll be seeing things change a bit.

Also, you'll notice some features are missing, like search. In time I'll be adding those missing features back in, but please let me know if there's something you'd like to see.

* I did manage to successfully write a CAPTCHA plugin for Wordpress that my old blog used for several years. But no matter what I tried I couldn't figure out how to get the CAPTCHA gui to appear in-between the comment field and the submit button; it was always below. The end result was that the CAPTCHA gui felt bolted on, and outside of the normal tab sequence. That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about -- I just never quite got comfortable with Wordpress in a way where I felt like I could modify without backtracking or running into walls.

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Marty Plumbo wrote: Jul-27-09, 7:30 pm

It's beautiful, HL! If your blog engine is as sweet under the hood as the pages it renders, it's the latest testament to your mad genius! :-P

Please consider making it open source or at least distro-ing it on your site!

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