Back to basics, you might think. When I started blogging, I wrote my own engine in PHP. It was a breeze to use, it had modules and styles (called flavours), and blog posts could be written as files. However, it was not a content generator engine, since it picked up these text files on every hit.
It handled a database to store basic things like comments or indexes, but it was way before SQLite: I used db4 as a key-value store to do this.
Time passed, and every single PHP upgrade broke something in the code. I felt the whole system to be a burden. After a while I created a last flavour for Blosxom.PHP to export all blogposts and comments to Wordpress with a tailored rss feed.
Fast forward to now. I turned away from PHP and started writing Rails applications. My priorities have shifted. My cornerstones, however are still around: a good ol’ zsh prompt and my TextMate (I fire up vim more often though). Now I feel WP is a burden.
Make no mistake, I believe Wordpress is a very good platform for personal blogging and even for a simple CMS, but it makes things difficult, and doesn’t allow the HTTP server where it excels: static page serving.
Most of a web page is static on a blog like this: archives, indexes, pages and syndication feeds can be generated, and only results should be put to document root. Moving parts can be deferred: comments, tweets, Google +1’s come from remote services. In fact, every local service can be replaced by some unobtrusive javascript magic, and a remote service.
But why the fuss? I don’t think I’ll ever be fireballed, but I strongly believe we should do better, with less resources, fewer database dependencies. I also don’t want to be a victim of an expired http session, crashed browser. Oh well, and I’ve fed up with web-based WYSIWYG editors.
Thus, I move back to js.hu, where I already have a ton of legacy stuff: some old Updike translations from a Hungarian magazine, even the first chapter of Rick Cook’s Wizards’ Bane. I led a guerrilla translation project of Joel on Software. I will keep serving these in their original (eg. ugly) format.
Therefore, expect new blog entries appearing here, mostly from my professional life.