New Blog (October CMS)

I've moved from a WordPress-based blog to one that is integrated with my primary website. WordPress was becoming a bloated and unmaintainable platform and didn't quite fit my needs. This new blog is built on October CMS, which is fairly modern compared to WordPress. Don't get me wrong, I think WordPress still has its place, but I wanted something simpler, so I am "Getting back to basics". That's actually the tagline that comes by default when you first install October CMS.

Why October?

One of the biggest reasons that I switched was the simplicity of the platform (I'm actually typing this post in Markdown, rather than wrestling with a WYSIWYG editor). It is also geared towards developers, with code-editing functionality built-in (WordPress has this too, but it only recently became usable enough). October just works out-of-the-box, with very little development time required. The codebase is also more modern, because it's built on the popular PHP framework Laravel. If I need to quickly make a change to the style, layout, content, backend, etc., I can acomplish almost anything just by logging into the backend and editing the relevant file.

Old Content

I still had some content on my old bloag that I'll eventually move over. I didn't export my posts from WordPress, so I'll have to temporarily setup  WordPress again *sigh*.

Next Steps

• The style is still pretty basic, so there'll be some improvements down the line.
• I'm still debating if I want to enable comments on my blog, they're not particularly useful for my SEO, and usually end up being a bunch of work to maintain.
• Social media integration and share buttons. It's hard to get noticed if users can't easily share your content! So that's another task to work on.