It was good to meet up with Mike Ramchand and Phil Harman last week at the Oracle User Group where Phil was presenting a talk entitled “Virtualisation Fever”. The conversation turned to personal web sites. Mike advised me to get off Snipsnap because its resource implications are too costly. It should be noted that there are a number of additional weaknesses due to its age.  It is written in Java and while it has an extensibility framework, using it requires Java and possibly Groovy, and I code in neither. Snipsnap’s tagging capability is cumbersome, the blog index uses the storage names not the snip titles, and only the blog generates an RSS feed, which is limited to the last 10 entries.  There are other small problems I have with it getting it to do what I need. It needs Java 1.5 and 1.5 GB of RAM to run the backups. It’s a jetty server and one needs ssh access to the host to administer the service, that’s why I am running it on IaaS.

Obviously I made the decision to move to move my blog to WordPress some time ago and so I really need to get to grips with making it do what I want. I have just ordered Hal Stern (and others’) Professional WordPress from Amazon. While thinking about what to do about the wiki, I looked at Ryan Barret’s blog, at snarfed.org, and he has moved his site from Snipsnap to WordPress. Ryan published a number of articles and scripts for snipsnap and says on his blog that he was real fan, so if he’s moved off, then I think I’ll follow him. I plan to use wordpress as my new wiki, I’ll install a second instance, one for the blog, and one for the wiki. Ryan has several scripts that I hope will be useful.

Maybe snipsnap is not the answer
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