As promised yesterday, here is why, and how I changed from WordPress.

Why change ?

It's a valid question, WordPress is an excellent platform and there isn't much to add to it.

But I was feeling very tired of updating it every two weeks or so because of a security update. It made me remember my days with Windows and their so-called security fixes!

Also, it was heavy. Heavy on the server, heavy on the browser. I mean... we are in 2011, we have big and powerful machines and it is still deadly slow. To load...a f****** blog?!? In what dimension please?

I installed cache plugins, rules to avoid harassing the server too much, even fine-tuned the MySQL server. Maxime Petazzoni (who is kindly hosting me) regularly had 10+k files created in /tmp from one of these plugins. And I don't even get that many hits! It was all non sense. I am not at the services of WordPress, it's the other way around!

WP is suffering from the Microsoft syndrome: too many users to make happy, too much legacy to bear with it. It just becomes bloated and wide open to attacks as many hackers are looking for them.

And so my quest began for a simple blog, that would handle my posts in plain text and would generate static files so it would be quick. I was even ready to give up on the comments! Such a disappointment... everything I found was in Ruby! RUBY FOR GOD SAKE! If you don't get it, it's like doing a new lightweight kernel focused on performance, and writing it in Java, or doing a new 3DS Max in Flash. It's pure madness to me... I really liked what I saw when I read about Jekyll until I found out the requirements. To me, Ruby is just another excuse to hide everything behind a layer of magic and this leading to that, your computer shop can sell you another 4Gb of RAM. I don't even think it's great to start programming... anyway.

So I realised I had to code the engine I wanted to be happy with it. I wanted to make it in C at first, then thought it would take me more time that I can spare on such a project and would also be a pain in the ass to compile and run on any other hosting. So I went with the good ol' PHP.

I tried to make everything as fast and as smooth as I could. Bear in mind, I made it for me and maybe some power users, it's not really tailored for any end users (if you can use it, I'm really glad though).

How to migrate from WordPress?

I just needed to take the content of my posts and write it in files with the correct naming convention. Believe it or not, what took me a LOT of time to figure out, was the RewriteRule set for Apache. I'm a lazy geek and do not like to bloat my code with something already done by brilliant people.

I digress...

A simple "mixing" software was able to do that for me. I then looked for a solution for the comments, that's when I found about the new version of Disqus which is REALLY good! I used a previous version on a little Tumblr blog when I was in South Korea, it was not that good, buggy and lost some data :/.

But no, it was a breeze to import the comments from WP. I just needed to geek out a little script to create a CSV file mapping the old URLs and the new ones. Once it was done, all the rest is magic :).

So right now, you are served static HTML with a just a sip of Javascript. I essentially went back from web 2.0 to web 0.9 :) The best part is that I have exactly the same functions I used in WP but now it's quick and I can easily hack anything I want.

If you have any questions or opinion on the code of Volatile, send me an email or better, post a comment. I will happily reply!