Scott James Remnant

I’ve not really been having much luck with blog software; I’ve found that the harder the software is to use, or the more maintenance it requires, the less I care about blogging.

Ironically, perhaps the easiest time was with Livejournal; it’s easy to set up, maintain and post to simply because it’s a hosted service. Unfortunately you don’t get a great deal of control over the output, and any kind of extras you want to add are out of the window. (Without paying somebody, anyway).

I moved from that to a Pyblosxom blog hosted on my own webserver; this had all the control over the output that I needed, with lots of optional extras. Management was a pain though, relying on me logging in to the web server and editing files directly — since nobody, especially me, likes writing raw HTML I’d chosen Textile as the formatting plugin but could never remember the formatting codes. And dealing with comments and spam? Forget it.

The next change in my experiments came when I moved my blog to being hosted by a friend, and he suggested Typo; the idea here was that it’s a drop-in webapp, so has an admin interface for writing posts, managing existing ones and dealing with comments and spam. Unfortunately it’s one of the slowest and least stable pieces of software I’ve seen, it’s really put me off learning Ruby on Rails as a result! And as a piece of software, it’s pretty inflexible; idiotic limitations made dealing with spam comments an issue and niceties like trackbacks almost impossible.

So I’m back to self-hosting my website and blog again, and at the recommendation of just about everybody, have installed WordPress to do it.

Since this means a change of backend software, this will almost certainly have spammed Planet again; sorry about that. I blame the original Planet author, really, I do.

Also I’ve adjusted my feed URL on Planet Ubuntu; previously this was a technology-only feed, but I’ve received far more complaints about the lack of posts about my flying exploits than when they were present — so the majority appear to want them!