Circle of blog
2010-11-22
I'm amused that on porting his blog to wordpress jwz has seemingly reached the same level of disgruntlement with wordpress in about a day that it's taken me twelve months or so to reach.
Don't get me wrong, wordpress certainly gives you all sorts of awesome features OOTB, but at a certain cost of complexity, which makes things tricky to customise. Themes are hard to tweak, and the cost of entry to plugin-writing is large enough to put-off simple customisation in favour of out-sourcing to the lazyweb directory of plugins, which correspondingly increases the complexity of your install.
Most pertinently, there's the security record, a cynic might suggest it's a lack of security record. I'm gradually coming around to the line of thought that the frequency of updates actively contributes to the problem. The continual treadmill of manually updating drives people to investigate the auto-upgrade procedures, which are all built around interfaces that sound to me like designed-in exploit vectors, like having all the .php files in the software tree writeable by the httpd user, or running an FTPd service on the webhost that can chdir to the http script directories. Furthermore, the autoupgrade process is prone to terrifyingly unfriendly fail-states .
I'm not sure if there are any significantly appealing alternatives out there. I think there's probably a circular life cycle to the blog software used by any mildly technical person , that moves serially from 'simplest possible lazyweb solution', through 'this simple thing has been customised past the point of sanity, I'll write my own' all the way through to 'writing blogging software is hard, I'll just use wordpress' and subsequently right back to square one.
The elephant in the room is the simplest option. Just host your data in an fully managed service like wordpress.com , or tumblr or posterous . Or if you really don't care about handing every last bit of data you can generate about yourself into the possibly malevolent skynet-cum-panopticon Google-monster, you could get all oldskool with blogger As ever, I just can't get with the idea of giving all my content to an at-best disinterested third party. After all, that's where jwz started out , and look where that's got him. Manually migrating to wordpress, and grumbling.