Eating My Own Dog Food

For a while I’ve been advising people who need simple web sites to use Wordpress. Not just people who want to blog, but people who need a very simple site with just a few pages. The reason I’ve been suggesting they use Wordpress is that it’s easy to update pages (Wordpress has a built-in WYSIWYG editor and automatic menu building), simple to extend and change the appearance of, and easy to maintain. Because you can keep drafts of your work in Wordpress itself and it runs on the server, it also doesn’t matter where you work on it from, so you don’t have to worry about business computer versus home computer.

A downside is the prominent security issues Wordpress has had of late (though the folks behind Wordpress are prompt in fixing issues and clear about letting people know they need updated software). I want to be clear that I am in no way suggesting being lax about installing security updates, but it is true that a Wordpress install that’s basically read-only - no user commenting and no remote posting enabled - is much less likely to suffer a break-in than a common blog would be.

I haven’t touched my web site in years. I started a blog at romkey.com and until now hadn’t posted to that in almost a year.

My site consisted of several poorly laid out pages that were quite out of date, written using Perl’s HTML::Mason package. I quite like HTML::Mason but it was overkill for what I was doing, and I’d like to get mod_perl out of my web server.

So I’m going to eat my own dog food and move my site to Wordpress. In fact, I’ve just remapped things so that the blog is now the site, and I’ve switched to using Wordpress 3’s standard theme, TwentyTen, with some tweaks. Because I’m also trying to get over not-invented here syndrome. (If you subscribed to the blog at the old address you don’t need to change anything; it should just keept working.)

I’ll move over pages from the old site as I have time to rewrite and update them.

Mmmm, dog food. Not as bad as it sounds!