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After 8 years of running on a homebrew system written over a weekend, I’ve decided to try someone else’s software.

What I was after was:

1. Commenting

   Most of my posts are link+comment, but if I write something longer than a paragraph, I wanted to throw the post open to feedback. But I didn’t want to write my own comments system and worry about fighting off spam and Cross Site Scripting attacks.

2. Posting from a client.

   I don’t like writing in an HTML text area. I’ve used Fraser Speirs’ wonderful XJournal for writing posts for my Live Journal for a couple of years now, and love it. I’m writing this post in MarsEdit. It’s a joy. I could had written my own XML-RPC code, but again, let someone solve this problem for me.

3. A Better Schema

   My homebrew system’s schema was written for the original model of link+comment. I stored the link I wrote about as a field in the database. Between then and now we have better XML tools such as XPath and DOM for referencing the links in a post. Greymatter and Moveable Type introduced ‘excerpt’ and ‘extended’ bodies (so you can write about spoilers!)

So I’m trying WordPress, that responds to my three wants. Is it perfect? No.

1. All pages are dynamic.

   The old weblog had ‘baked’ pages for the current weblog and Atom feed. As Aaron Swartz pointed out a few years back, it’s better to serve a static page out of the file system rather than build the same one over and over. Tim Bray recently argued that you can use AJAX to modify a baked page in the client, who has cycles to spare. WordPress can bake, but you have to hack it.

2. Moving your archive is a pain.

   With more than 3,000 entries, importing these into the new system, without breaking links, is non trivial. I’ve decided to use some mod_rewrite rules to continue serving the archival posts off my homebrew software until I muster the energy to import the old posts into WordPress.

3. You have to do things someone else’s way.

   WordPress is open, and you can modify templates to your heart’s content. But you’re still doing things the WordPress way, and not your way. The K2 skin for WordPress has many nice features, but I’m less than happy with the CSS and JavaScript hooks. Link+Comment posts are still a hack. So were mine, but my hack was less onerous.

It’s an experiment. I can switch back to the old style with a few config edits.