Jamie Starke bio photo

Jamie Starke

I develop for my career, but I also develop for fun, and whenever I think it can solve a problem I'm having. This has lead me to create side projects, such as Rental Map and BusTimes, among others.

Consulting Newsletter Email LinkedIn Github Stackoverflow More

For anyone that checks my site regularly, I’m sure you’ve noticed some fairly big changes over the last day or so.

I recently decided to move to Wordpress, over my old Drupal site. There were many reasons for this. Drupal is an immensely powerful CMS, but with great power, comes great responsibility. Specifically, I found that there were frequently critical updates that were required for my Drupal installation, and it was my responsibility to take care of them. This involved downloading the latest versions of the Drupal core and any modules, going on to my home laptop, opening Cyberduck (ftp), connecting to the server, backing up my database, putting the site in maintenance mode, uploading the new versions of any modules, then running the database upgrade scripts. If it sounds like a lot of work, believe me, it is.

Even after all that work, I was never really happy with my installation. It always felt like it was slow, and people would comment that my site is slow. I was constantly looking into ways to speed it up, and eventually I came to the realization that I was putting more time into maintaining my Drupal installation than I was putting into adding new content to my site. If you ever find yourself doing this, run…

I started to look into alternatives. I had worked with Wordpress before and it seemed to work well, but I figured I would check to see if anyone else had recommendations. I sent out a tweet, and only received 1 response. Christoph told me that he had been using Wordpress for a while and it had “Practically no maintenance effort”.  That was just the nudge I needed (thanks Christoph). To my surprise, many things are so easy on WordPress, that I was able to even install a number of Plugins I needed, from my iPhone!

So all my content is now up on the new site, although the urls have all changed (ya, Wordpress takes care of that, on Drupal I did it mostly myself, but I know, it too could be automated on Drupal). So, welcome to my new home online. I hope that you find everything you’re looking for.  If not, let me know (contact info on the right side), and I’ll do my best to fix it up.