Moving to a blog

My first web site went live when the Mosaic (The original web browser; made by NCSA.) web browser was released.

My website, my skills and my interests have all evolved over the years. I have tried things like Zope, PHP, server-side includes, and even Front Page.

The problem is: I really don’t want to have to manage the nuts and bolts of my site.

I occasionally have an idea or something I want to share with people. Then I get the urge to update my website. Unfortunately, this makes following through with the urge, updating the website, a little too expensive. Usually I notice that part of the theme is missing, or that some links are broken, or that I didn’t actually finish that thought on some page. You add to this that I am a software engineer who does web application design all day; I’m not really interested in taking my work home with me.

So I stay away from my website.

So, I have given in. I have evaluated Drupal and WordPress.

I don’t want to do the Zope thing again. It was big, unwieldy and reeked too much of work. It did way more than I ever would want from a personal web site.

At first, it seemed Drupal was better than WordPress. I was annoyed at the way posts were managed and the fact it uses MySQL and not PostgreSQL. Drupal promised to let me customize a bunch more and it has a large number of plugins.

but… but… but… Setting it up initially worked okay, but then I tried to download some input filters (format engines for posts and stuff). Well, Textile didn’t work at all. It turned out it was for an older Drupal, though it showed up in the “filter for 4.7” section of modules. The interwiki module didn’t work at all (it looked mostly due to MySQL-isms). To make things worse, as I looked at how the interwiki plugin was written, I was appalled by the API for changing stuff in Drupal.

I went back to looking at WordPress in more depth. It has the advantage that it is a blog and only a blog. It does what it does and does it well. It’s mostly simple and the wordpress website has lots of information on common blog tasks.

It ended up taking me about 4 days of work to do this. I a lot of work, considering that I had a working site before. But not that much work considering what it could have taken. All in all, I’m pretty happy, now.

So, here is my website. Reborn, reconstituted, rebuilt for … what, the fifth time?

For those who want a purpose for this site:

1. To promote me. I’m a nice guy, I should be promoted.
2. To pass information on to friends and family.
3. To act as a store house for projects, writings, and other creative works.

Ciao!