Can I have my Geek badge please?

In the jungle of platforms available for bloggers, the big beasts of Blogger and Wordpress stand out. I experimented with both.

• The 'old' original Blogger was super-easy to use - taking literally just a few minutes to set up. I wanted to host on my own domain, and old Blogger allowed this. New super-duper Blogger does not, though.

• Wordpress takes a while to come to grips with, and many hosting companies have a simple-install option to get Wordpress running on your site in no time. I really liked it and spent several happy evenings playing with all manner of plugins. But then, I got scared.. scared by the simple blank and empty screen staring back at me when the Wordpress database failed. Luckily, there was nothing of value lost. Of course, there are plugins to assist with back-up and restoration of Wordpress databases, but it was still scary stuff for me so I decided to look for other options.

A Hit-List Of Must-Have Blog Features

I thought about what was important for a blogging platform.

• Good navigation facilities
• Hosted on my own domain
• No database to maintain
• Excellent navigation capabilities
• Easy to customise template
• Simple to write and edit articles
• Great tools for navigation
• No licence fee
• Flexible structure

Powered By Blosxom

I think over a two-week period I must have looked at every blog platform available. There are some really wonderful systems out there. In the course of my investigations I found something called 'Blosxom'. This is about 500 lines of Perl code (runs as a CGI), and not much else. The project dates back to 2003, is open source, and there are quite a few plugins available for additional features. The Yahoo-based support forum is full of spam, and the SourceForge forum is quiet. I didn't know Perl, but felt adventurous enough to try to install Blosxom. It was actually pretty simple (or maybe I was lucky). I was struck by it's minimalist philosophy, drawn to it, moth-to-light like.

So, this blog is powered by Blosxom. In the last month I have done quite a lot of tweaking and customising (having learnt Perl), but at the core is the Blosxom code.

Watch for these future posts:

• Template design of this blog
• Navigation design of this blog

tag:geek