Tired of WordPress
Last night I took a good look at my blog that I had not touched in quite some time. It consisted of a few solid posts, a few not-so-solid posts, and a huge collection of half finished posts. It was a WordPress blog. Like most WordPress blogs, I had a few themes and plugins installed. It was nothing really noteworthy.
This blog was really just a security hole.
I've patched this system more often that I have written entries. To run WordPress, I run a server (Linux), a web server (Apache), and a database (MySQL). That is a bunch of upkeep, and I just don't have time for it anymore. So, I thought, why bother with all of this overhead? I've had one comment on this blog, and more importantly, I loath comments in general. I do not need a blog capable of providing highly dynamic content.
Inspired, I started doing something I hadn't done in almost two years. I started hacking up some raw HTML and CSS. "Just a basic page." I thought. "I just want to focus on the content." So, in about an hour of tweaking font sizes, and setting up a few S3 buckets to house my content, my new site had form.
I've been meaning to actually use a few new technologies recently, so I figured this was a good opportunity to pick up Node.
The next afternoon after work, I hacked together a JSON data file to house my entries and a quick Node.js script using Mustache.js to render static pages and upload those to S3.
Now, rather than running all of those systems, my blog consists of generated static files on S3.
Advantages:
- there is no software to patch
- the system will always perform well
- it is super cheap
- highly cacheable content