Uneasy Rhetoric

For a while now, I’ve been more or less neglecting this site. I’ve kind of hit a brick wall on it. There are a lot of things I could do to make it work better, behave better, even look better, but I just don’t seem to want to take the time to code them (much of that time would be spent learning how to code them in the first place).

So, I’m thinking about moving the whole thing over to WordPress, an open source blogging tool that is very similar to Moveable Type. I know enough PHP and MySQL that, if I wanted to customize it more thoroughly, I could. However, other than style tweaks to make it look the way I want, most of the customization I would normally have to hard code could be done, in WordPress, via option choices. The more I look at it, the more I think this is the way I want to go.

This could cause a few problems. Mainly, I would do everything I could to ensure that the syndicated feed would continue to work because, much to my surprise, I know there are a few subscribers. WordPress has its own way of doing syndications which is different from the way I’ve been doing it, so to keep my current feed going would require some additional hard coding.

My main reason for wanting to switch is that WordPress already does much of what I had planned to build into my current system, and I hate reinventing the wheel. The downside to all of this is it means I won’t learn as much or have has much need to build my development skills. Since I don’t really need them for work anyway, I’m not sure it is the best use of my time. I have other learning priorities I have placed higher than coding.

This all leads up to a bigger question: would switching systems make me more likely to post entries on a regular basis? Or would I just continue to obsess about this or that little tweak?

Am I really wanting a more robust blogging system, or am I just being seduced by the latest (for me) gee whiz gadget to add to my arsenal?