I finally got tired of wordpress, and I’m trying out octopress. If you have a blog, I think you would probably also be happier using octopress.

Reasons to switch:

• wordpress doesn’t just work; it takes endless supervision. This is complicated by the seeming inability to get only security related updates, so I always feel forced to stay on the version treadmill for security reasons. This frequently breaks plugins.
• wordpress treats security as an afterthought. For instance, the first thing you may think of is locking down the wp-admin directory to your home ip, but last time I tried this breaks the site.
• php is security-hole ridden junk. This seems to have improved over the years but I’m still a little uneasy about using it, whereas only serving static html should be very secure and only require a single serving program making it much easier to keep up with security.
• serving php with nginx is fragile; there’s multiple ways to set it up and none of them seem to work particularly reliably
• there’s always 10 plugins to do any given task, none of which fully work or fully integrate with wordpress. I tried to get markdown working with wordpress last weekend and it was a nightmare
• wordpress is slow, and caching plugins are brittle; serving static html from octopress should be lightning fast.
• octopress comes with a bunch of nice features like syntax highlighting that doesn’t require loading 15 different javascript files ala the syntax highlighter I’m using

Reasons I want to switch:

• I really like the idea of serving a static site and deploying with rsync
• I like using git to version my site and vim to write posts

I will miss comments, but I hope people will email instead. That said, of the nearly 20,000 comments my site has received I believe fewer than thirty weren’t spam. In fact, wordpress has a whole cottage industry selling a comment spam control tool called Akismet created to fix how easy wordpress makes comment spam.