Back on Blogger

My last post was one year ago, almost to the date. And then my blog got hacked. I repaired the damage, but ended up locking the site down because I couldn't solve the cause of the vulnerability, a WordPress install that wouldn't upgrade.

Now I have redesigned the site, which I'll write more about later, and moved back to Blogger, which I'll touch on now.

When I first started blogging at the tail end of 2000 blogger was the hot new thing. Then I stayed with Blogger for 7 years. What can I say, I'm not a fan of migrating data and configuring crap.

But eventually the lure of greater typography drew me to WordPress. For about a year I enjoyed the greater control of hosting my own blogging software. It came with a price. I missed an upgrade. And then when I tried to apply then next one, it failed.

So now I have moved this journal back to Blogger. In the year that this site lay dormant I've learned a lot from working on a high traffic public website at my day job. My previous job's focus was on security, my focus at this job (and the site's current failings) have to do with speed.

Security

With Google hosting the blogging software for this website I don't need to keep it up to date. Also, serving the pages as static HTML (ok, there may be some PHP involved, but that's a secret), even if it did get hacked and somebody injected a PHP file, it's not going to do anything. Go ahead, try going to http://divinentd.com/links.php.

Speed

There's nothing faster than serving static files. No database queries, no run-time processing of the page. The site on Blogger is simply faster than it could ever be running on other blogging software.

Conclusion

In the end I'm happy to have moved back to a low tech reliable solution. This way if I decide tomorrow to not touch the site for another 6 months, I don't have to worry about anything happening to it while I'm gone. The piece of mind is worth any loss in geek credibility.