Why? Mostly because of the ecosystem: There are lots of plugins and programs that work with WordPress that don’t work with Habari yet. I was working with WordPress on another project and found it a great plug-in for adding time-lines to a WordPress blog. That kind of stuff is years away from coming to Habari.

Also, because Habari is still an alpha-level project. It’s not finished yet. It’s pretty, and the code base underneath it is supposed to be really excellent, but I don’t want to work with the code base. And when I do try to find bugs, I can’t report them.

And there are a lot of things that WordPress just does better. For example: “Remember Me” on the login page actually works. It automatically replaces regular vertical quote marks with the pretty quotes. I can hit Ctrl-I and it will make the text italic, instead of me having to manually code in <em> tags. Updating to the latest version of the software is as easy as pushing a button (no need to open up FileZilla at all!). And, new in the latest version of WordPress, you can embed videos just by including the URL on its own line. For example:

Lastly, and most unforgivable, Habari does not have a built-in export option of any kind. If it weren’t for this script (mirror) that somebody wrote, I would have been having to export each entry by hand (or else write my own script, which would have taken at least as long). Not cool Habari!

So, anyways, let me know if you see anything that looks broken. Thanks!

Will this change also lead to me posting more often? MAYBE!

I attempted to submit a bug report on the Habari website, but gave up after several attempts were rejected as spam for some reason. So, maybe some Habari person will read this instead.

The posting screen actually looks and works exactly right in the mobile Safari browser, but I find it’s very small and difficult to read on the iPhone’s screen.

After much searching, I found the post via email plugin in the Habari Extras repository. It’s clearly a first draft, but it works. (I’ve posted a ticket on the bug tracker that corrects an issue where the post would have extra line breaks every 200 characters or so.)

Anyways, now I can just write new blog entries in the Notes application on the iPhone. When I’m done, I just push the little email to button and give it my secret blogging address, and within 10 minutes, the post (with any tags) is added to the blog. It’s a delightfully simple setup.

As you may know, I’ve been having some… issues with my old WordPress blog lately, most notably the issue that caused WordPress to delete my sidebar. This was the latest in a series of minor annoyances with WordPress for me, and so I started looking for other blog platforms.

I came across one called Habari, developed by people who were disillusioned with the way WordPress is developed. Habari is beautiful and simple both to install and to run. I absolutely love how clean and easy this is to use.

The only downside to Habari is that’s it’s new, which means that there are some minor bugs and that the documentation for theme designs isn’t very good yet. But these concerns are minor; Habari is an excellent choice if you’re looking for a blogging platform.

In case I ever move again though, I’ve put this blog’s RSS feed onto Feedburner. Subscribe to that in your favorite RSS reader, and you shouldn’t ever have to worry about missing anything because I moved my blog. Just click the big orange button on the bottom of the screen and sign up.