I recently installed WordPress on my local machine to test it out, as a possibility to replacing the seemingly dead boastmachine that I am using right now.

As I began writing the template to bring the Wordpress installation into working with my own graphical web design, I noticed all kinds of funky HTML. I've always thought that nesting a lone table cell ( <td> ) inside of another was illegal - as the real way to nest tables would be to go through the complete process of writing the table statement, table rows, then cells. But - in the Wordpress calendar, table cells were nested within one another! I also found the separation between programming and design to be somewhat absent, although I do realize that it is difficult to accomplish this fully and especially when other people who did not write the software must understand the basic idea of the code. Also, who uses <h2> in a side bar? That seems to be a central theme of Wordpress templates. Not me...but easy to fix. Some h2's seemed to be coming from some mysterious source outside of the sidebar file. There were also plenty of odd tags such as <small> - which would be something I would normally relegate to using CSS and defining the font size as a percentage of the parent element's size.

boastMachine, on the other hand, outputs very clean and efficient HTML, and although I have tuned it up quite a bit, it was good from the very beginning. The file organization in boastMachine also seems to be somewhat better (there are less files for the templates, and also the programming - it isn't nearly as complex.

If I did migrate to WordPress, I would have to write a script to move the boastMachine posts over to the WP database. I would also likely have to do some manual work to change the categories. I would also have to change the URIs to all of my posts (which I may do anyways with boastMachine - though implementing a redirect system to do it gracefully).

• WYSIWYG editor that outputs HTML nearly as clean and efficient as what I can type by hand. Boastmachine's built-in editor is not too bad, I just never use it, for some reason.
• Good file upload system. I may be able to modify the existing one.
• Ability to dynamically place flash video in a post.
• "Tag Cloud" system

boastMachine is growing old, and does not have all of the bells and whistles that one can get with WordPress. I am, however, going to stick with it and update the system in order to add in some more "modern" blog features, rather than move into uncharted territory with Wordpress, with its twenty different files for templating, new URIs, new database, and nested td tags.