Why I Use Toto

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, the footer says “powered by toto.”

Toto is a minimalist blogging engine that runs on Ruby on Rails and is fully compatible with the heroku platform. Heroku provides an inexpensive, yet powerful, cloud based application engine.

I’m a huge fan of Wordpress, I recommend it to most people who ask what they should use for their blog. But two major factors lead me to toto:

1. I’m a security professional. My website getting hacked would be a major embarassment. Toto is built on flat files. There are no databases, no usernames and passwords that make it run. On the heroku platform, the flat files are pushed via git using private keys. Someone would need to get access to my private github key to modify the site. While Wordpress can be secured (certainly wordpress.com, the commercial version, has a good security record), it requires time. I don’t always have time.

2. I’m a big proponent of cloud computing. I wanted a platform that was inexpensive to run, based in the cloud, and still gave me the ability to customize. Given the current processor requirements of toto, heroku is free. Additionally, I have full control of all functionality of the application. If you can write it in ruby, you can make it work in toto. (Unfortunately, I’m no ruby expert… yet.)

Many sites refer to toto as the “tiny Wordpress killer.” Unless you’re a hard core developer, I doubt you’ll enjoy working with toto. Wordpress has a long, strong future ahead. At the moment, I’m enjoying a different perspective.

Interested in trying toto yourself? My recommended toto reading:

Getting Started with toto

Introduction to toto

4 tips for how to customize a toto blog

As originally posted at jayschulman.com on January 12, 2012.