05.11.04

WordPress, my mistress

Posted in Web at 11:40 pm by Danny Dawson

MovableType was wonderful. There were many of those middle-of-the-night moments when I rolled over and told her so. I was with Blogger before I made the move to MT oh-so-long-ago, but Blogger always left me feeling unsatisfied. There was something missing in our relationship. I can hear you all out there, whispering behind my back, saying that Blogger should have been good enough for me, saying that I have control issues.

I won’t deny it. I wanted the upper hand on my weblogging software. And when I started fooling around with MovableType, I had it. Or at least I thought I did. You see, once I’d left Blogger, MT would spend all day every day waiting for me (she never left our server); she would cook me up a nice new archive page whenever I asked; she’d help me clean the outdated posts off my front page; she obeyed my every command.

In some ways, I found MT too complex (I never could understand what made those old-fashioned Perl girls tick); but in many other ways, she was too simple-minded for me. For one thing, she couldn’t always remember to lock my files when she’d finished with them. I felt vulnerable with her around. And even though she was always loyal, she took forever to finish doing whatever it was I had asked. Sure, she could put away my things into categorized containers, but could she break them down into sub-categories? I think not.

I decided it was time to move on to someone more with-it, more up-to-date, more adaptable, more…my speed, if you catch my drift. So I put myself back on the market. I wasn’t quite ready to part from her yet - yes, I am codependent on my weblog software, it is sad, but true - so I kept it secret. It was so hard not to post it here for all to see, but I kept it down successfully. I started fooling around with Textpattern and WordPress around the same time a few weeks ago (WP: I swear you came first). I would still post to MT, but my posts weren’t frequent, and I would be messing with WP’s code the whole time. (How does she react when I put this in there? Ahh, I like that.)

Textpattern just wouldn’t do it for me. She spoke a language I knew I’d never bother to learn, she didn’t really seem to do anything that WP didn’t already or couldn’t learn, and her back-end…well, let’s just say that there was too much there. (I’ve always been known to prefer a compact-looking back end. Besides, I can manipulate WP so easily, if I wanted her to put on a few pounds, she could pack it in pretty fast.)

So begins my relationship with Wordpress. I admit, she’s another piece of software whose language I’m not yet fluent in, but I can understand her enough to communicate, and I’m eager to learn. Maybe it won’t last. Maybe this is just today’s NBT. But so what? I could never resist those foreign-language girls.

In case you’re wondering, BSAG introduced us. I went looking for the moon and found myself among the stars.

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