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Blog: roll my own or just use Wordpress?

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Re: Blog: roll my own or just use Wordpress?

#11

Post by detaro »

dsacco wrote: post #9
detaro wrote: post #6

Wordpress has way to many security problems, especially if you use plugins, as that I would want to administer it myself. Especially since wordpress is so popular and you can assume that vulnerabilities are actively exploited very quickly. A static site generator, something hosted or even a more modern, less popular platform takes away a lot of that pressure.

This isn't really true. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has a good security team and an active bug bounty program. They respond to reported vulnerabilities, especially serious ones, extremely swiftly. Furthermore, a good hosting service will eliminate almost all the security issues Automattic doesn't catch. If you get a good host (e.g. WPEngine) you can automate backups and security updates, and the host wi…

So you don'd administer it yourself, but use a managed service. Which is exactly what I suggested as an alternative, because it means that you have someone monitoring it and taking care of it and don't have to take care of quickly installing updates and stuff.

Re: Blog: roll my own or just use Wordpress?

#12

Post by davismwfl »

To me it is more about what do you want to do more, create and support your own blog software just so you can post once or twice a month or just use something that works so you can write. From my own experience if I have to create/support the code, I stop writing consistently and fail to post.

Wordpress is a bit of a beast, but it just works. The security concerns while not improper, are just not that worrisome for a basic blog. Wordpress can be plenty secure if you keep plugins to a minimum and follow best practices.

Ghost is a great option, and way more back to basics blogging to me. e.g. it gets rid of all the noise of trying to be everything to everyone which minimizes the security risks etc. This would be the direction I would recommend personally.

Re: Blog: roll my own or just use Wordpress?

#14

Post by runjake »

I avoid WordPress self-installs due to its poor track record on security, so I'm currently using http://jekyllrb.com.

However, there's something to be said for just being able to open up a page on WordPress and start typing away.

The (albeit small) speed bump to getting a new post going in Jekyll has kept me from posting/writing many times. It's slightly cumbersome. I may switch to WordPress.com or something, soon.

Re: Blog: roll my own or just use Wordpress?

#16

Post by thenomad »

Having done both, repeatedly: use Wordpress or another blogging platform (I hear good things about Jekyll but haven't used it).

The feature set issue looks small, but becomes bigger the more time you spend on the single piece of blogging software. And the bigger and more sprawling your homebrew system becomes, the slower it is to add additional features, and the more likely you are to introduce bugs or security issues...

On that subject, security's another major problem. SEO comment spammers are persistent, and if they discover a way that your blogging code isn't secure, they'll hammer you. WP, provided you keep it up to date, has a lot more eyes making sure it's secure than you do.

(Counter-argument: if you're not going to keep the install up to date, don't go WP. You WILL get hacked.)

Re: Blog: roll my own or just use Wordpress?

#17

Post by czep »

thenomad wrote: post #16

Having done both, repeatedly: use Wordpress or another blogging platform (I hear good things about Jekyll but haven't used it). The feature set issue looks small, but becomes bigger the more time you spend on the single piece of blogging software. And the bigger and more sprawling your homebrew system becomes, the slower it is to add additional features, and the more likely you are to introduce bugs or security issue…

I tried jekyll and it is an excellent compromise, providing all the goodness of a flexible templating and layout system with the ease and server-lessness of static pages. Combined with s3-website, it took me about 3 hours to rebuild my blog (mostly time spent editing old posts into markdown).

Thanks for all these recommendations!

Re: Blog: roll my own or just use Wordpress?

#18

Post by r3bl »

I used Wordpress for six months before I have decided to move to Jekyll, and it _is_ amazing!

Jekyll sits somewhere between Wordpress and manually coding your own website.

I have listed all of my reasons here, so you might want to take a look at it: http://r3bl.github.io/en/why-switching-to-github-and-jekyll/

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