Russell Beattie

When I first started using WordPress almost two years ago, I was very happy to finally have a piece of blogging software I didn't have to maintain, and that had lots of functionality that I could add with plugins, etc. I knew nothing about PHP at that point, so it was a learning experience even getting it running on my server. Since then, however, I've been developing in PHP, and now have a pretty good handle on it. Combine that with the fact that as time went on, I wasn't using many WordPress features, and I came to the conclusion the other day that I should just throw a few scripts together and start using my own blogging code again. I started out blogging using my own code (using Java and JSPs), so I think it's a nice circle that I'm back again, but using a different platform.

WordPress is still pretty great, don't get me wrong, but it's just now a bit heavy for my use. I have been slowing but surely using less and less of it as I go along - I don't have comments, use categories or tags, nor do I use pages, widgets or plugins. I replaced the blogroll links page with a live query to my feed reader's subscriptions a week or so ago, and someone complained about the search function the other day, so I had swapped that out for a Yahoo! based search that I had been using on my old blog. Finally when I started trying to fix the Previous/Next links which weren't working, and replaced the Archives (which I don't like, as they duplicate a lot of blog content on long pages), I decided that it was time to start thinking about something a bit simpler. I was a bit hesitant, however, as I didn't feel like creating a whole admin console as well, but then I discovered the various XMLRPC clients out there like ScribeFire, and it dawned on me that all I really had to do was write a single XMLRPC interface, and I was done. So that's what I did this weekend.

Yep, I replaced WordPress with all of 9 php pages and a stylesheet (archives, feed, home, index, links, post, search, template, xmlrpc). It wasn't all completely procrastination either, as I've been noodling around with a different template system to use for my Mowser stuff, along with a simple page routing system that would be fast, but didn't need a lot of overhead that a full framework like Zend or CodeIgniter would require. Being able to have a little project to mess with and try stuff was really nice. I purposefully did not add any mobile version of the site, as I'm going to be using Mowser to transcode it and eat my own dogfood.

I'll be messing with the stylesheet sometime soon as well as I want a cleaner/simpler design like my old blog. That will come over time - the nice thing is that the template is just one file now, and it's compatible with WordPress so that will give me lots of options.

(BTW, this is my first real test of the posting system as well... crossing my fingers!).

-Russ