Saturday, January 25, 2003


Now running on Blosxom!


After surprisingly little time (for the bulk of the conversion), modulo lots of tweak time to get things to “look” almost the same, I have migrated this weblog from Blogger to Rael Dornfest’s most wonderful Blosxom.

I didn’t have much trouble with Blogger, except that having my content management system hosted on an external server imposed an additional, unnecessary level of complexity when I had a capable, enterprise-ready server operating system, with tools to match, already sitting on my desk. I looked at Movable Type, but the level of complexity (additional Perl modules, etc.) seemed like overkill compared to Blosxom’s streamlined setup.

The other big benefit is automatic RSS generation. Previously, generating my RSS feed was an arduous, largely manual process. In practice, this meant that my RSS feed always lagged behind the weblog and frequently wasn’t updated at all (when I was in a hurry or otherwise tied up.) The new blog generates valid RSS on the fly, providing a full feed.

Minor issues

Commenting is currently turned off, as Enetation seems to be experiencing an outage (perhaps related to the latest MSTD?), and Blosxom’s native comments plugin isn’t quite available to the public yet. My older archives remain in Blogger format, since it didn’t really make sense to republish them.

I’ve been contemplating a redesign, and indeed it probably won’t be far off, but I figured that one major change at a time was enough. With Blosxom, the mechanics of blogging are now simple enough to give me more time to play with new things, like trying to make this page validate [fat chance ;) ] and to come up with an attractive design of my own, rather than working within someone else’s.

As always, please let me know if something renders really strangely on your system, or if you notice missing contents / broken links, etc.


:: Dave Walker 16:56 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
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:: Comments (1)

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There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted. -- Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior