EOL: PolarBlog

It is with mixed feelings that I announce the end of life for PolarBlog and will be ceasing further development.

As anyone who has followed it's development will note, progress has been slow the past couple of years.  This is somewhat twofold, it's stable and does most of what I need (the primary driver) and also because I simply no longer have the time to do significant work on it.  Which is really the point I'm at.  The only real "want" feature that I haven't implemented is clean URL's.  That wouldn't be too difficult, but beyond that it would require major rework.

The time has come to address some of the fundamental architectural issues that exist.  If I were to do it all over, the first decision I would make would be to use a templating engine (Yapter obviously) from the start.  I've also learned a lot over the years and although I don't consider it horrible, there are some things I would definitely do differently.  It's a safe, secure and fast platform, but some of my past decisions have somewhat painted me into a corner when it comes to expansion.  The lack of templating makes theming rather difficult.  You can change the color scheme, but you can't easily change the layout.  And to fix that now would require a lot of work.  I'll never again build anything without fully separating the view.  MVC anyone?

It's been an interesting exercise and it continues to meet most of my blogging needs.  But it's time to the face facts that it's a very small fish is a big pond.  A pond dominated primarily by WordPress.  A platform I'm not a big fan of mostly because of their very bad security track record.  One of the advantages of being smaller is also being less of a target…although that hasn't stopped the spammers from automating comment spamming for PolarBlog.  Thanks, I'm flattered, but the world would be a better place if you would all just die.  Thankfully I implemented a number of counter measures (RBL, Akismet, IP blocking) that largely just made it a nuisance, thus you can stop wasting all of our time.

So where does that leave me and others who are currently running PolarBlog?  For me I've opted to move to Chyrp.  It has a larger community and is actively being developed and supports virtually all of the features that PolarBlog has as well as many it doesn't.  If you'd like to follow me in moving to Chyrp, it's probably best if you install and start playing around with it.  You're obviously under no obligation to do so, but I will be building a tool to migrate from PolarBlog to Chyrp.  If you choose to go another direction I'll try to answer any questions you have, but migration to anything else is up to you.  More information regarding the migration will come once I get it worked out.  In the meantime I'll continue to run PolarBlog and address any security issues that should, but are unlikely to arise.
November 1, 2009 @ 08:13 am | Category:
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