When I got the urge to create this site, I assumed that I would do it in Rails. I’ve been building Rails site for a few years and I love it for my CCSF and CSM web sites.

So I made a frill-free list of the features I wanted: CMS, blog, shopping cart, and checkout. Whoa, there partner! This is getting to be a lot of work, even using All Mighty Rails. I know myself, and I know that I would be fiddling with this humble set of features for months. Damn, I wanted to be in production mode in two months, not still slogging through the initial phase, like Monsieur Grand in Camus’ The Plague. (You’ll get used to my literary references. Before my current incarnation as a PHP/Ruby/Perl programmer and teacher, I was a practitioner of Comparative Literature.)

When I added in “research time” to beef up my knowledge of blog protocols, I began to sense that I was about to start a one-man Death March into the Heart of Darkness. So I swallowed my pride and consulted a wise friend who snickered at my unsophisticated plan. “You want to do this by yourself in two months, and write the content, too?! You’re stark raving mad, as usual. You gotta go with a pre-made solution.”

I looked around and immediately rejected Django (as another evanescent distraction), Moveable Type (the wrong language—Perl), Joomla (too grand for my simple plan), Drupal (a baroque behemoth, grander than Joomla by dint of the kitchen sinks tossed in here and there), and cakePHP (I don’t want to live in CakeLand and play by Cake rules).

So I settled on Wordpress, a PHP-based solution that I could tweak painlessly. The plus is that I’m really not interested in how Wordpress works, so I can view it as utility, like a refrigerator running in the corner. Who gives a flying rat’s ass about refrigerators? No one. You just use it to keep your food cold.

So, there is it: a bland, boring, utilitarian solution that just get the job done, kind of like PHP itself. Just what I’m looking for.

Long live Wordpress. Long live PHP.