When I started this blog in June of 2005 I was using WordPress. At the time I was doing Java development and had yet to hear of Rails. Shortly after the blog turned one year old, I migrated to Typo and then to Mephisto in March of this year. Both Typo and Mephisto are capable blogging platforms, but last week I moved back to WordPress.

When I first moved the blog to Typo, I thought running it on a Rails application would give me more experience with tweaking and deploying Rails applications. While that did happen, I recently realized that I was spending all of my “blogging time” putting out fires and trying to bend Typo/Mepthisto to my will. I have a lot of posts that I want to write and a lot of projects that I want to take on. In the end, diddling with my blogging engine was distracting me from other things I wanted to accomplish.

WordPress is a mature platform that is still actively maintained by a team of developers. There is also a large community creating plugins for WordPress. Most of the things I was writing code to accomplish in Typo and Mephisto could be accomplished by installing a plugin in WordPress.

Finally, my blog is currently hosted through DreamHost. Rails and shared hosting don’t really get along very well. As far as I am concerned, the price is right at DreamHost for hosting a personal blog. I don’t want to pay for a VPS just to host my blog.

After doing a quick Google search I found similar stories at a few other places. I have no desire to write code in PHP professionally, but I think it hits a sweet spot for small applications like blogs and simple CMS engines. Here at Fiat Dev we are all about using the right tool for the right job.

Anyway, this migration should free me up to finish some of the other projects that I have been putting off. Oh, yeah. I will probably write more often, too.

Tags: dreamhost, mephisto, php, rails, typo, wordpress