Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't the title be "Why I don't host my own Wordpress blog anymore"? Seems like most of the complaints were about the finickiness of WP. Why not host something like a simple static blog, with Disqus for comments?

View on HN

Switching from a car to a bicycle will indeed decrease your gas consumption but that does not turn bicycles into acceptable substitutes for cars, even if you jury-rig a horn on them.

WordPress is, far and away, the best blog software (and particularly software ecosystem) out there. I wish there was a Railsy alternative a fifth as good, but there isn't.

Railsy? Why does blogging software need to know anything about HTTP requests?

I meant that if there were a WP-caliber Rails blogging system (and community), I'd happily switch to that, because I'm very well-versed with how to run Rails sites and because that would make it much more hackable for me. (I'm theoretically capable of writing PHP code, but practically have "Don't do it, Patrick, this is why you are best friends with a PHP developer" written in indelible ink on my wrist.)

The forum and cms options in rails are fairly abysmal right now. I've worked with refinerycms a bit, and it seems to have the most potential so far. No rails forum packages can compete with phpbb, though.

What parts of Wordpress do you find superior to alternatives?

I'm building yet another blogging platform (not quite) right now. It isn't going to be Wordpress, but it will be managed and won't cost you $200/mo. A carcycle, if you will.

To carry the analogy to its end: you seem to be only using the car to drive ten blocks to work. In other words, you only serve static content + comments. Which is why I'm curious what, specifically, compels you to stick with Wordpress even though there is an obvious cost (be it money or effort.)

The biggest one is the ecosystem. Can I get a WooThemes-caliber theme done for your CMS at 3 AM in the morning for $70 without talking to anyone? And will it work virtually instantly as soon as I drop it over? And will that play well with e.g. using the blog as a lightweight CMS, with custom menus, static pages, and whatnot in addition to the blog proper? And will that work with the plugin ecosystem when I want to do just-a-wee-bit-trickier things like the What Would Seth Godin Do prompt?

> Can I get a WooThemes-caliber theme done for your CMS at 3 AM in the morning for $70 without talking to anyone?

I know you run a business, so for you the answer may be 'yes', but for most people running a blog: is this really a huge concern?

To borrow an upthread analogy, if I'm switching from a car to a bike, whether I'll be able to get a complete paintjob at 3am for $70 without talking to someone is not really something that's going to make the pros/cons list.

I think compatibility WooThemes & friends is, in fact, a huge concern for the majority of bloggers.

Perhaps not those with traffic problems. Hopefully by then you've found a way to direct that traffic to useful revenue or have enough cash from your business to invest.

In OP's case, he's spending money on hosting a CPU-intensive blogging engine. In theory he could spend the same money on theming an efficient one.

Of course it depends on what you need, but wordpress is not even close to the best blog software if you need standard blog features and a site that actually runs without the kind of maintenance problems described.

If you want a huge plugin ecosystem and easy theming then yes, it is the best. You just better get caching right because it's going to hit your database 100+ times per page load once you install those themes and plugins.

" wordpress is not even close to the best blog software "

So - what is closer to the best blog software? Better yet, what is the best blog software?

>> I wish there was a Railsy alternative a fifth as good

Radiant CMS http://radiantcms.org/ . I don't even know Ruby well and I find it easy hack on, add extensions, and take features away that would get in the way of the client using it.

But what does it do that makes it apparently uncacheable? Your pages change when you write a new blog entry, or when someone posts a comment - and even then there's no hard constraint that requires their comment appear immediately - serve a stale-by-60-second page and I doubt most people would notice, never mind care. If your blog engine can't serve one page every sixty seconds to the nginx/vanish/other reverse caching proxy in front of it, just what is it doing?

(This is partly a genuine question and partly a rant caused by seeing my VPS go into swap death spiral when the googlebot came around, just because WP apparently couldn't serve more than about ten simultaneous requests. Intellectual curiosity says I'd like to know, but life really is too short to go back to having to deal with it fo rreal)

Unless you expect to be in the blog software business this is the first step down a dark path into the abyss.

It always starts as a "Hey, I can just have this static page". Then, "...well I just need this simple feature, and I've been wanting to learn node.js anyways..."

You don't really have to balloon it if you want just a blog. Over the years my blog-generation script has slightly expanded, but it still clocks in at one Perl file of 639 lines, a lot of which is boilerplate. It generates HTML, an index, and an Atom feed, with a few options for the index, which is about all I need.

But what simple features are these? Would you please list a few?

The historical problem with "blogging" is that it was invented in an era where we didn't yet have Disqus, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Feedburner, YouTube, Slideshare, Google Analytics, or even Digg, Reddit, or Hacker News. If you wanted any portion of the functionality of any of these things you had to build it into your "blog". And so hacker blogs were enormous code-heavy things that tended to get heavier with time.

But nowadays I'd argue that, to first order, any work you do to reinvent any of the functionality of any of these things is an expensive luxury. Others have concluded the same, which is why so many blogs have shed so many features and gone back to being: A bunch of static web pages full of writing. With maybe a sitemap and maybe an RSS feed, and maybe comments with Disqus, but maybe not.

But I'm always curious to know what I might be missing out on if I switch to Octopress, so please: A list? Sell me on Wordpress!

You make a valid point. I gave up on rstblog because I wanted a simple feature - like not treating every file in a folder as a potential blog post (e.g., trying to include an image) - and after glancing at the source code, quietly closed my laptop and reconsidered whether the world needed to hear my thoughts in a blogable format.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com