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One of my goals this year is to write everyday. For years and years (and years), I use Wordpress to manage my blog. It worked well but there were always so many features, that I stopped using it.
It sounds weird to stop using something because of too many features, but, it is true. There was always lots of SPAM as well in the comments and I got tired of keeping up with them.
When I first started blogging in 2002, my friend Pete Loats had shown me David Winer's Radio program which enabled users to publish a Web log from their desktop. I decided to build my own clone called gWave out of Perl and make it web-based. I did this for a number of years until I found a CMS (I can't remember it) and then Wordpress.
I decided to simplify and build a blog with flat files for 2016. Instead of databases and templates, I wrote a simple tool in Python that lets me write a blog post and have it outputted to an html file. It generates an RSS feed and then I jst need to upload it to my server. It works very much like Jekyll but uses Python instead of Ruby.
Some features have been lost like automatic Twitter links and Flickr integration. I look at that as a positive because I can now concentrate on writing and not trying to create a cross-linked brand.