Changes

I’ve been working on a major overhaul of my weblog for the last couple of months. Among other things, this post serves to (hopefully) stave off going through this again for as long as possible.

Background

When I had the first mostly-complete draft of this post put together, I thought I had a pretty good idea what the new setup was going to look like. This doesn’t look an awful lot like that version. That being said, my list of what I want the new system to do isn’t all that different than it was when I started.

So, in no particular order, here’s what I was looking for:

1. Markdown. Writing in HTML sucks. Sure, I still use HTML, but trying to write in it is just stupid.
2. Markdown Extra. I put footnotes in some of my posts. The original Markdown syntax doesn’t support them.
3. Low Maintenance. Most blogging software requires that I, as a user, pay attention to security releases and update things regularly. Historically, I haven’t been great at doing this on my site.
4. Control. I want to be able to use my own templates, my own CSS, and have the same permalinks that I had before.
5. Portable. I frequently play around with templates, style sheets, etc. on my staging server (Apache on my MacBook Pro) before pushing them to the real site. All things being equal, I’d like to do this with the real data, rather than made-up data or old data from the last sync.

As far as I know, none of the systems out there do everything that I want, although some come close than others. I think #2, and therefore #1, conflicts with every hosted blogging service except for Tumblr. #3 conflicts with most non-hosted blogging software. #4 is a problem with some hosted blogging services, but not others. #5 conflicts with almost everything.

Unsurprisingly, not all of the desired features above occurred to me at the beginning of this process. I had been working on a custom system, but that doesn’t really fit with #3, since I would be doing all of the maintenance. Sure, I could build a system with no internet-accessible moving parts,¹ but I would still be building just about everything myself.

Contestants

I was looking mostly at hosted services — if I was going to use a traditional dynamically generated blogging package, it might as well be WordPress, which I was already using anyway. Being hosted services, they all satisfy the low maintenance requirement. Again, in no particular order:

WordPress.com

No Markdown or custom templates. While the service doesn’t let you choose your permalink style like the software does, they seem to use the correct setting by default.

Blogger

No Markdown, wrong permalinks. I think it has full customization.

TypePad

No Markdown Extra, as far as I know. I’m assuming it passes muster on permalinks, since I’m pretty sure Movable Type does as well.

Tumblr

Wrong permalinks.

Obviously, Tumblr was the leader of the hosted services. I think the only other major shortcoming was the lack of syntax highlighting. Sure, that wasn’t in my original list of requirements, but its awfully nice, and last I checked Gist hadn’t updated to a version of Pygments that does AppleScript.

In the end, I chose WordPress, with a different theme and almost an entirely different set of plugins than I started with. My new theme is a fairly simple Thematic child theme. The only custom plugin is a text formatter that I’ll probably release through the standard channels sooner or later.

The current version of WordPress does okay on the low maintenance requirement, since it can update itself and most plugins automatically. I have a lot less effort sunk into my theme than I used to, and I’m liking that. My text formatter still needs some work, but it gets the job done.

So, what did I learn in all of this? I honestly have no idea, but with any luck, I won’t forget it for a long time.