First Post
This is (once again) the first post to the blogged cjc.org. New server: why not a new content management system (I mean, beyond a bunch of files on the file system)? This is the third blogger I’ve tried. The first was blosxom, a very neat little perl script that organized the “bunch of files on the file system”. My HTML is unfortunately too weak to put up some things I wanted without munging it badly, such as side bars. The second one was Greymatter. Seems nice, but I got nervous about it not being actively maintained, as well as how it seemed to store contents in .cgi files on the file system. Also, it didn’t support categories in its standard distribution, though someone had hacked categories into one modded version.
So, I’m giving b2 a try. PHP based — not bad, I can hack the PHP — with a MySQL backend — again, a plus (though it’s somewhat surprising that there aren’t more PHP/MySQL journal apps; atengine looks good, but is still in alpha). Development is ongoing, and there seems to be an active user community. We’ll see how it works. So far, the interface is very nifty.
With such an easy content management system, I may even start writing again. In the meantime, this “first post” isn’t quite a first post. I’m going to dump a bunch of old stuff into the blogger. I’m not that interested in self-expressing to the world. The thing that struck me a few months ago when reading about blogs was how a number of people were using it as extensions of their memory, a sort of web-based lumber room. Of course, they realized how important their blogs were to their memory and research habits only when they lost them due to hard drive crashes and so on. Remember to run backups.