For a very long time I have been dissatisfied with WordPress. Although it’s the best PHP blogging engine out there, it sucked.
Firstly, it’s slow. I got the front end a bit snappier by caching the living crap out of it, but that did not help things for me in the backend. So, what to do? ~
I’ve been looking towards ruby-based blogs a lot. Typo and Mephisto were two of the first ones out there, but they just didn’t feel right. I did try Mephisto for a while. However, the project didn’t appear to be under active development and I had a really hard time migrating my WordPress content.
Then came the first static site generators into my view. Jekyll being the obvious choice because of its affiliation with Github. But again, I had a hard time migrating my content (which consists of 192 blog posts, excluding this one).
Then along came Toto. Toto is epic! Without much effort I dumped my posts into files and I had Toto up and running! It worked! All my content was here!
There are two things that make Toto so great. Firstly all content is stored in files, so they are under version control and no database is needed. This also means that pages are served very quickly! Secondly it’s rack-based, which means I can deploy it easily to my VPS at Kabisa under passenger (and Unicorn when I migrate to that).
Well, so here I am! Still fiddling a bit with Toto (especially the HTML) as you can see. My goal is to make everything HTML5-compliant, but that’ll have to wait a few days.
Thinking about moving away from WordPress yourself? Feel free to comment or ask questions!