Converting from Wordpress to nanoc

For seven years this site has been using Wordpress as its main engine. There are a number of advantages to using this feature-rich piece of PHP, but I finally decided that the disadvantages were enough for me to switch to a static web site generator called nanoc.

Some of these disadvantages were:

• Slower than static HTML
• Frequent need to update to latest Wordpress for security reasons
• Occasional emails from Wordpress about comment spam that needed to be marked as such
• Inability to use my favorite editor to write posts
• Posts are a funny mix of manually and automatically generated HTML
• Need to have an internet connection to write posts

Using nanoc to generate the site has these advantages:

• Very fast serving of pages
• Less storage and CPU usage on the server, which should lower hosting costs
• Write posts and view the site on a local machine, even without internet connectivity
• Use any editor to write all aspects of the site
• Use git to do versioning and history
• Write posts in Markdown instead of HTML
• All content, including so-called static pages, not just blog posts, will have a consistent appearance

This site has now been converted to use nanoc. In this effort, I was helped by the following:

• Dave Clark’s information on basic blog setup using nanoc’s blogging features
• Jakub Chodounský’s information on implementing a search feature

The one feature that has been lost in the conversion is commenting. Due to this site’s very low popularity, this is not a great loss. If you would like to comment on a posting, please send me a private email (see the About/Contact link to the right) and I’ll update the posting based on your input.

I’ll leave the Wordpress engine running for a month or so, so that links on other sites will not break immediately.