This will be the 4th post on this blog announcing that I’m switching to new blogging software - of 6 total posts. Maybe I just like deploying things more than maintaining them. But in this particular case, Wordpress had to go. Every few days it would just die randomly. The php-cgi processes would just lock up until I came in and killed things manually. Wordpress is actually pretty decent from a user perspective, and I suspect the lockups had something to do with the way I was running it or one of the plugins I was using.
I settled on Mingus. Mingus is basically a collection of reusable Django “apps” put together to form a blog. At first I was skeptical, but I have to say I’m impressed. It has an impressive array of built in apps and features. For example the django-request app gives a nice overview of visitors to the site without the need for AWStats or Google Analytics. Of course it has built in Google Analytics support as well. Mingus comes with so many built in features that I have yet to try most of them, and have ended up disabling some.
Mingus is not something a non-technical person could probably set up, but if you know a little about python webapps you could probably get Mingus going in a few minutes. Importing posts, tweaking the layout, etc will take somewhat longer, but Mingus is very hackable and you’ll hardly be alone: github currently shows 45 forks of Mingus, including mine.