Welcome to my Blog!

Building a Fast Blog with Get Simple CMS

...or how I ditched WordPress for something more practical.

 

WordPress is great. It has a ton of themes, a ton of plugins, and a ton of support due to it's widespread adoption. Furthermore, WordPress can scale to handle a lot of users and a lot of posts. However, this functionality comes at a price. 

 

  1. WordPress uses a database to store posts. This means you can efficiently store a lot of content, but every time you want to retrieve something, your server has to make a database call. Speed is sacrificed.
  2. WordPress has a ton of plugins. This means increased functionality. However, speed is sacrificed as those load. Also, plugin writers are hackers. Installing plugins is like downloading an app for a porn website. Don't be surprised if your computer catches a virus. Don't be surprised if your website gets repurposed to make some group in former Soviet satellite money from ad clicks.
  3. Try to move a WordPress site to a different host. Just try.
  4. Widespread adoption makes you a target. Just like parking a Toyota Camry in the hood, everyone on the internet knows how to hack your WordPress site. 

Most bloggers, business, and people don't need WordPress to run a blog or site. It's overkill. All those features mean a lot of processing power to run the web page. If you're on a shared host, which is pretty common if you only pay $10/month for hosting, that means you're sharing that processing power with other sites...sites probably running WordPress. If you have a dedicated server, the same problem occurs as you increase traffic. Right up to when your provider recommends you get another server. 

So, ask yourself...Do I have hundereds of bloggers posting to my blog? Do I have thousands of blog posts? Are my comment threads hundreds of posts deep? Do I even have a blog? If you don't have any of those things, WordPress is wasted. Furthermore, it's slow. How slow? I had a simple site that took 12 seconds to load. My traffic? Like 2 people a day. All of that delay is due to a slow-ass Content Management System (CMS) on a slow-ass shared host. 

I went searching for a solution that was flat- something that didn't require a database and could be easliy moved to different hosts. Speed and portablity were key. I wanted something that was easy to post to, allowed me control, and had a decent number of themes to start me off-

Get Simple CMS

Get Simple is what this site runs on. It stores data in text files. It can be moved to different hosts by simply copying files over ftp. It's perfect for a small business site. However, I wanted a blog platform, and it doesn't do that out of the box. So, without furher ado, here's how I did it:

  1. Download GetSimpleCMS
  2. UnZip and upload to your website
  3. Navigate to

Blog-ification

  1. Download the Plugin GS-Blog
  2. Install steps here
  3. In the GetSimpleCMS admin page, click on the Blog Tab
  4. Click on Catergories, and add a few catergories.
  5. Click on Manage Posts and add a few posts. With those posts, click "Post Option" and add a thumbnail and assign to posts to catergories. This is so you have some placeholding content to work with as you customize the blog.

Customization

  1. Add the plugin "Exec-PHP" the same way you added the blog plugin. This plugin allows php to execute inside pages. This will allow you to create custom blog pages which list posts.
  2. Throw some stuff in the sidebar
  3.  Fix the "Read More..." section

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