This website is now divorced from WordPress.
To tell the truth, they have been estranged for quite a long time. Their heyday was in late 2008 (after LiveJournal was no longer fun) through early 2009 (before Tumblr became too much fun).
There is a lot to like about WordPress. She is popular, sexy, fun, and worldly. She is also high-maintenance. She requires a database. Not just an optimized organization of her data, but a complete database service, available at all times, at her beck and call. She requires a web host — to be fair, all websites do — but she will not ride in anything less powerful than a web application server. You’re pretty sure you don’t need this much horsepower to serve a simple web page, and besides, all that flashy scripting ability is just going to attract thieves. She does not care. She knows what she wants, and what she wants, she gets.
Like all high-maintenance types, the common denominator of all her desires is your time and attention. Her security updates, which require plugin upgrades, which result in unexpected template rendering issues, all of these consume time that could be spent on the activity you thought most important when you entered into the relationship: writing.
I am a hypocrite.
Rather than move to one of literally dozens of alternatives, I rolled my own. This is Mud Pie. It’s a Ruby program that generates HTML from a wide variety of input files. Once generated, you can upload that HTML anywhere that can serve static files.
I have been working on it, off and on, for nearly two years. I think I finally got it where I want it.
Prior to this website, I’ve been using Mud Pie to generate the pages and podcast feed for Matt & Brett Love Comics. That was a brand new project; I didn’t want to migrate this site until I could figure out how to preserve the existing content.
It turns out the answer is, change the data as little as possible, and let the software do the hard work.