After a two month hiatus from writing, and one month of actual
downtime, this blog is back. The reasons for downtime are mainly
various technical problems, most of them having to do with
me wanting to host the blog on the big windows machine under my desk,
instead of some decent hosting provider, and also a two-week holiday in
Guatemala, during which I neither had the opportunity or felt the need
to get the site running remotely.
As for the writing hiatus, that had to do with some fairly substantial
changes that are going on in my life. At that time, it was to early to
say anything in any place that google indexes, but now things can be
told.
But that will be for a later post. Right now I want to divert your
attention to the brand new, sleek, unmodified-right-out-of-the-box
design of the blog (well, most of you probably read this in a RSS
reader and those that don’t, should consider, but…). I’ve moved from
dasBlog on WinXP to Blosxom on FreeBSD, mainly for the
reason that my FreeBSD box has only had one hard drive crash in five
years, while my Windows box has had two in just over six months. This
also reduces the number of boxes that I have to have running
permanently under my desk.
I could have tried to install Mono on FreeBSD and kept on running
dasBlog that way, but since this machine is a 166 Mhz Pentium I, it
might not have proven to be such a snappy experience. Blosxom (which,
by the way, should be spelled ‘bloxsom’, according to my fingers) can
be configured to generate static pages, which is much more suitable
for that kind of horsepower, and it’s also nicer from a security
perspective.
The drawback is of course that I have to import all old entries (and
comments) from the old blog somehow. Since all the stuff is there in
good ol’ XML, it should be no more trouble than a 15-minute hack. FLW.
Bloxsom wasn’t the only blog software I looked at, but it won on
virtue of having no database dependency. I really like to avoid using
RDBMS’es whenever I can, and the need for MySQL/Postgres to power this
blog is really really not that big.
Having said that, I’m not 100% happy with blosxom either, in
particular the way that the base install has very few features,
instead relying on a extensive catalog of plug-ins to add
functionality. I would think that this leads to features being poorly
integrated, even conflicting, with each other. But I’ll probably have
a more informed opinion once I try it out more extensively. Also, I
don’t like that the posting date is the same as the file
timestamp. Over time, I’ve managed to reset timestamps on a large
amount of files in a number of circumstances, and it would be a pity
if this metadata for my blog postings were to just disappear.
