Aaaannnd we're back!

So I have spent some time converting my posts from wordpress to Pelican and I'm pretty happy with the way things are turning out. There are still some items that need to be gone through. For instance, you can still see the marks from the changeover in the template, but that will change with a bit of time.

Why Change the Blog Engine?

Wordpress is great. For my sister-in-law who also blogs a bit, there is nothing better out there. I am a bit of a command-line kind of guy. The truth is that I have been nervous about losing a lot of real work because of some power blip in india that took down a MySQL server or some hacker found a security loophole that gave him command of all of WordPress... including someething of mine.

When I saw at one point that I had over 25 posts, I thought to myself "I need to change over quickly or it won't even be an option".

It has been bothering me.

I started looking around and found pelican. I could go on for a while about the benefits of using a 'static' site, but here are the things that make me more comfortable:

I have complete control over every bracket/period/space in every source file
Does not use a database
Since nearly all content is text-based, it is easy to control and archive using git
Security - what's to secure? Its a bunch of text files and images.
I have complete control (yeah, that is worth mentioning twice)

Again, I'm not bagging on WordPress, I just found a continuing unease with the the vulnerability to a particular platform. In fact, I'm giving some things up to go to a text format.

The Wordpress workflow is a breeze to set up a post
Plugins! Wow, the plugins!
Native user stats are just par for the course
Comment areas built-in

When it comes down to it, I just like the control.

So What's Next

I am going to continue to improve the 'new' static site. In particular, I want to pull the categories off of the top row and just leave them to the right. I also want to remove some of the templating to the right - such as the 'Blogroll' - and some of the items at the bottom.

I need to fix the tags to the right... apparently the theme is not picking them up.

I just made my first post since making the changeover today, so we are moving ahead!

Lots to do, better get to it!