Maybe this will be better…

I’ve gone ahead and switched our blogging software.  I was starting to have too many problems with the old system, and have been reading lots of good things about this system.  In addition, some people I really trust to make good decisions about software to use for mission-critical applications recently chose this same platform for another project.  If it is good enough for them, maybe it’ll be good enough for our extremely-low-volume-and-not-very-complex blog!  🙂

One of the things that I like about this system is that the back-end is written mostly in perl.  I use perl just about every day for all kinds of things, so this is quite convenient.  Some readers may not know this, but I like playing with code.  Here, I can actually do it.  Not that PHP (which is what the old system used) is terrible or anything, but every time I tried to do something new, I ran into a roadblock with something.  Either the complexity went through the roof, or I thought it might be a security risk, or actually doing what I wanted to do required a few more plugins.  Blah blah blah.  So far, I’m pretty happy with the back-end architecture of this system.  As an example, I spent yesterday evening installing this new system, loading in some test entries, and just playing around with it a little bit.  Tonight, I spent about fifteen minutes with some of the documentation to get myself familiar with some of the internal workings, then spent about an hour importing all of the old entries, re-working the templates to build the pages, getting the neat little random photo thing to work in this environment, and getting the site ready for a refresh.  I also spent about an hour and a half re-structuring the filesystem layout for all of this domain, which I had been wanting to do for some time. 

The end result is a blog that loads much faster, is easier to maintain from the administrative end, and has some nice additional features.  Additionally, the filesystem layout and rewrite rules make a lot more sense now, and should allow me to do some additional neat things with the site in the future.

Why bother with all of this?  Well, I’m a techie.  I can’t help it.

Note:  This is my first time playing with tags on this blog.  We’ll have to see how that works-out. 

jonathan