Jack Baty has a New Year’s resolution: Don’t change blogging platforms more than once a quarter. Say what? I don’t know about the rest of you but changing blogging platforms regularly seems to me like getting divorced and remarried regularly. What sensible person would want to do that? Baty’s excuse is that he likes to tinker and mostly blogs about tinkering so naturally changing blogging platforms seems to make sense to him.
For me, blogging is all about writing and sharing my discoveries. The last thing I want is to worry about is my blogging platform. I want it to be as transparent as possible so I don’t have to think about it. I just want to write my post in Org mode and push a button to publish it.
I started blogging with Blogger. It was easy and it wasn’t too hard to turn an Org mode file into a post. After a while I got my own domain, Irreal.org, and moved to WordPress. It’s not all that different from Blogger—except that Google isn’t lurking in the background deciding whether my posts are acceptable—and, like blogger, it’s easy to publish Org files as posts.
It’s been 14 years since I moved to WordPress and while it’s sometimes a pain, I’ve never seriously considered moving to something else.
There are, it seems to me, two type of blogging platforms: static and database-centric. Static blogs are simple and don’t require backups but they require more work on the front end. Database systems, like Blogger and WordPress, are more turnkey but are more susceptible to exploits and require you to backup the database periodically.
I don’t know which is the best—it probably depends on your inclinations—but once you’ve decided on a platform you should probably stick with it unless there are compelling reasons to change.
WordPress certainly isn’t perfect but it’s good enough. It allows me to concentrate on my writing and not worry about the details of publishing it. Unless things change drastically, I don’t see Irreal changing.