Blog On WordPress And Other Silly Work
My blog has always used WordPress as the engine. I remember version 2.6—that was a long time ago. Over the years, the engine has been actively developed by the community. It’s now at version 4.7.
At some point, adding new posts became painful. Formatting issues, breaking changes after engine updates, and abandoned plugins turned into a nightmare.
I just wanted to add a post. Pass a message.
Come on, why does it take so much time!?
…
Another example: together with some friends, we built netdevelopers.pl. The idea was to create a resource hub for the Polish .NET community. And it worked. We launched it just before the .NET Core 1.0 release. It used NancyFx and Bootstrap. The site ran on Mono (CentOS Linux). The codebase was clean, tested, and had its issues tracked on GitHub.
But again, adding information was (and still is) painful. A developer had to find the correct JSON file, edit it properly, and push it to GitHub. Finding the right file alone was a task.
Come on, why does it take so much time!?
New Way Of Knowledge Building
Looking back, I realized I had been solving the wrong problem.
In the first case, the platform became a monster—bloated and hard to maintain.
In the second, we followed good development practices, but the end-user experience was complex and unintuitive. The code was elegant, but usage was just painful.
Simplicity To The Rescue
I’ve heard “don’t reinvent the wheel” so many times that I try to apply it everywhere.
Markdown syntax was just sitting there, waiting to be used. I had tried it a few times before, but unreliable plugins made my polite attempts fail miserably.
This time, I was prepared.
I noticed static content generation was gaining popularity. After some research, I found the WYAM framework—written in .NET, modular, actively maintained, and well documented. It turned out to be both good enough and simple to use.
I gave it a try.
Result
Markdown offers everything I need to write posts and articles. And it’s not just for programmers.
WYAM is a solid framework.
Now, with fewer options (thanks to WYAM’s constraints), the information is structured and focused.
Static sites are also fast. WordPress often fires off tons of HTTP requests—completely unacceptable in today’s performance-driven web.
No more hassle…