Well I finally got sick of writing custom code/templates (I’ve used static files using templates/Makefiles as well as dynamic pages using Perl/HTML::Mason). While I’m quite proficent with Class::DBI and PostgreSQL, it just wasn’t worth the effort of writing all the administrator forms for managing content.
I had a few major requirements:
- Secure and actively maintained
- Themeable so I can make it look like I want to without too much work
- Decent admin forms for managing posts and comments
- Can be hosted on my personal server on synfin.net
Hence, I tried Blogger. But wtf? They support sftp (secure ftp over ssh) but their website doesn’t support SSL. So while they can login securely to my server, I have to send my username/password in clear text to them? You would think that now that Google has bought them, with all their PhD’s they could figure out how to purchase a SSL certificate and load it on their webserver…
Anyways, so then I started looking at code I could maintain myself. After much research, I ended up with WordPress. I’m not thrilled it’s written in PHP and uses MySQL; both of which I personally think suck from a developer perspective, but that doesn’t prevent people from writing decent apps it seems.