[Note: I’m writing this more to remind myself why I’m sticking with WP rather than because I think any of my potential readers will enjoy it.]

I briefly flirted with Movable Type and decided it wasn’t quite for me (but not before wasting a few hours learning its template system and porting my design). The move was mainly because I prefer to write my posts in Textile rather than the (horrible) WYSIWYG editor that comes with WordPress.

However, MT has a number of drawbacks. The main one is that it publishes posts statically. At first I thought that seemed like a great idea. It surely would save on the processing power required to serve pages. However, this limits what can be done with a layout. Since the sidebar is hard-coded into a post, it either cannot contain dynamic items like a list of recent posts or comments, or it must be rebuilt every time you post something. It was reasonably fast when I was testing it, but I can imagine that it would slow down noticeably over time. Its template system is complicated and spaghetti-like. I felt like I was doing something wrong every time I made a change (and then of course, I had to rebuild the entire site).

Following this interlude, I switched back to WordPress to see if I could make it work the way I want. I was able to find a working Textile plugin and shut off the WYSIWYG editor. And I found a quite passable Flickr photo importer (which means I don’t have to use WP’s clunky file manager).

So I think I’m back to WordPress for good now. Here’s hoping.