A few days back, I issued a challenge to myself to move from Mephisto to Webby as my blogging platform of choice. I’ve actually been tinkering with the idea of moving this blog for a while, and now it is time to make good on my wishes.
<p>My reasons for wanting to move are simple enough. The is that I want to remove complexity, and having a blog based on a simple <span class="caps">HTML</span> generation engine has great appeal to me. The second reason is that I want to lessen the memory footprint of my blog on my <a href="http://www.slicehost.com">Slicehost</a> VPS. The third reason will ring true to many of you who read this blog; I’m moving my blog because I like to try different things. And the last reason is that my friend <a href="http://reinh.com">Rein</a> is running on Webby, and from what I’ve heard things are pretty good on his side.</p>
<p>The first challenge of moving the blog was to figure out what “moving the blog” actually meant. I’ve settled with keeping most if not all of the content, all the public assets, and none of the comments. This wasn’t an easy decision, but nixing the comments opened up more possibilities for the final outcome. In the new blog, I’m going to evaluate the comment systems from <a href="http://js-kit.com">JSKit</a> and <a href="http://disqus.com/">Disqus</a>.</p>
<p>With the <em>what</em> out of the way, I can now move on to how. I regularly pull down dumps of the smartic.us db to my local workstation, and once a month or so, I make a full offsite backup of the entire site. The Mephisto schema isn’t very bad, so I’m going to pull the textile out of a mephisto dump and replicate that data using the Webby architecture. The assets directory will be copied over as is.</p>
<p>Another reason I wanted to move my blogging platform is that it would give me a reason to update the look of the blog. I’ve been super hesitant er resistant in learning liquid, and the complexities involved with building a Mephisto template were always a greater challenge that I wanted to take on. Now I can create my layout in regular old <span class="caps">HTML</span> and it’ll look just as scary as ever (but at least I’ll be able to maintain the scariness.)</p>
<p>This brings me to the last item I want to point out today. I’m a lazy person. Super lazy to be exact. For me to update my blog with new content these days, I either have to really excited about something, or stuck in a place where all I have to do is update it. Moving to Webby lowers the price of entry now. I do must of my work in Textmate, and generating textile or markdown is pretty damn simple. No longer do I have to worry about the complexities of <span class="caps">XMLRPC</span> just to get a new post out to the masses.</p>
<p>I’m excited to move, hopefully I’m not biting off more than I actually wanted to chew.</p>
