Tech Blog

It has been just over a year now since my last post.  If you have visited my blog before, you’ll noticed that I have switched it from MachBlog to Wordpress.

What seems to be a sudden change has been, actually, a long period of testing and contemplation of different blogging solutions.  Being mainly a CFer, I seriously considered several ColdFusion based blogging apps, as well as a JAVA based solution, Blojsom.  While they are very good I was convinced that the right solution for what I needed was Wordpress.  Why?

Even though my CF-Angel tells me not to go with a PHP based blogging engine, the truth of the matter is that I just need a solution that works well, adapts to changes in technology and blogging trends (ie Social media/micro-blogging) and is easy to manage. Wordpress is very well known and used, stable with tons (literally) of plugins and templates right off the bat.  I really don’t want to modify the code under the hood to get what I want and this seems to have everything I need want so far:

• Easy plugin install (over 4,000 of them and I can search & install them right from the admin)
• Easy theme switcher (thousands of them free)
• Easy import from RSS feeds (I had to write code to import the comments though)
• Permalink support (pretty URLs)
• Multiple RSS formats
• Twitter plugin (better than many of the plugins I’ve seen from other blog engines)
• Facebook plugin (various plugins & features)
• SEO plugin (powerful)
• Google Analytics
• Stats plugins (multiple plugins to track the stats of your blog)
• Anti Spam plugin (I hope this saves me a few headaches)
• Mobile plugin (present blog in suitable format for mobile devices)
• Full Screen WYSIWYG editor (so convenient!)
• Global Translator (translates your post into 34 different langs. Not interested on this one for now)

I can keep going on and on, but as I said the list is over 4k.  

For now I’m happy with the move and with the peace of mind that if I ever want to move my blog again (to BlogCFC or MangoBlog?), all my posts are using “pretty URLs” so with a few rewrites I should be back on track and not loose the indexed pages in the search engines.  That’s is not the case right now as I’m don’t think I’ll spend the time figuring out all the uuid’s of my old cagetories and blog posts to match the new ones. For this time I’ll only make the redirects for the  RSS feed URL, Transfer Config and Environment Config projects, the rest will have 301 redirects to the home page of the blog. From there just hope that Google and other search engines decide to index all my pages again.

Note: My take here is ONLY on blogging solutions that are available on ColdFusion, PHP & JAVA, NOT on how these three compare to each other as programming languages.

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