Wordpress is a good least common denominator when it comes to blogging. It's good for someone to throw some PHP scripts on a random server and have a basic blog running in a few minutes with little configuration.

It's no good for programmers. For me in particular anyways. Reasons:

• PHP, yuck. Blogging is something I do purely for fun. PHP is not fun. PHP is a horrendous, sometimes-necessary evil to be avoided if at all possible.
• Text mangling. Quotes are turned to smart dumb-quotes. Newlines are mangled into paragraph blocks. wp-includes/formatting.php has 1200 lines of mostly regular expression replacements. Getting text to show up literally is sometimes hard. People post comments and sometimes Wordpress eats them for dinner. I get complaints all the time.

One of the most important things for a blog like mine is the ability to post plaintext and not have it altered in any way. This is possible if you hack Wordpress enough, or take your chances with various plugins. I've never had success with those kinds of plugins or with plugins of my own. Wordpress changes too often, the plugins break, or there are one or two hooks that are overlooked, or one or two regex-replacements I forget to undo. * Bloat. The only features I use are the ability to post text, categorize it via tags, let people comment on it, and let people browse archives of posts. Spam filtering is nice too. These are not difficult tasks. Wordpress adds all kinds of of baggage on top of that, most of which I never use. Pings? Trackbacks? Blogrolls? User registration? Draft posts? Private posts? File uploading? Crappy WYSIWYG in-browser text editors? Plugin systems? I don't need that stuff. * Permalinks are handled by Apache mod_rewrite rules. Yuck again. There are better ways.

So I'm thinking of migrating away from Wordpress. Which is probably going to be a bit painful if I want to retain all of my current posts, and avoid breaking every link anyone ever made to my site. But it's doable.

What to migrate to? I'll probably write something myself. It's usually easier to write something yourself than to hack up someone else's stuff to get it to work right.