So about a year ago, something happened with my old hosting service. They made some backend change where they switched out the version of Python that worked with all my websites, to a weird flavor that basically broke everything. So I had a decision to make, I had to move Planet Geospatial to a new host and get everything set up again. The only mistake I made back then was thinking I was smarter than I am. Rather than just migrate the code of Planet Geospatial, I’d convert the service into a WordPress site using FeedWordPress. I exported the feeds and easily got Wodpress working as well as the plugin. Everything looked great…
You many have noticed a couple things about Planet Geospatial in the past year. First off the site was slow as a dog, basically PHP ran every time you accessed the site and checked to see if any of the hundreds of feeds needed to be updated. If so it updated the feed in the database which by itself wasn’t too slow, but coupled with people accessing the site, things were very pokey. On top of it, the entries in Planet Geospatial sometimes pointed to the Planet Geospatial website itself and not the actual blog location. This meant that you couldn’t get to whatever article you wanted to read. The feed parser choked on a couple feeds and generally these were the ones that were updated often.
Last week I decided I couldn’t take it more. The WordPress version of Planet Geospatial had been under my skin for months and people started noticing that it wasn’t working right. Clearly something had to be done. So I did what I should have done a year ago, moved Planet Geospatial back to running on the Planet Venus aggregator. As of this morning, the DNS has been updated[ref]I would appear I brought down both Planet Geospatial and the NY Times last night[/ref] and things appear to be running perfectly.
This all taught me a lesson. Never use a CMS for anything that is important to you. WordPress, Drupal, SharePoint, etc will do nothing but disappoint you. That’s why I’m going to convert my blog here in the next month or two away from WordPress to a flat file Markdown formatted system built using either Blosxom[ref]Going back to my roots with Perl[/ref] or Marco’s Second Crack if he ever releases it. Blogging will be nothing but zen…
Update: @tooshel points out that Octopress might just be what I’m looking for.
Spatially Adjusted 