Blogs, Blog software, and other drivel.

Well, as some of you might have noticed. My blog has had a bit of a facelift.

A few months back, when I was thinking of starting up this rant sheet, I started looking at some of the possible blog systems to "help" me achieve this.

Recommended was Bloxsom which is nice and pretty, seems to be widely used, however requires CGI and perl.  The other big name was Movable Type, but that seemed way over the top for a puny little personal blog.

So, what to do?  I thought "well let’s look for something PHP based", which if you know me, I’m a bit of a php whore…   Recommended* was S9Y as it is PHP and authored by many core developers of PHP – seemed perfect!   { * I’ll not be listening to that guy again }

Oh how wrong I was, what a pain in the ass S9Y turned out to be… Badly structured, poorly thought out, and quite lacking in foresight.   To get it to display blog posts on my homepage, I had to hack it into my homepage.  The authors clearly accepted people would want to do this, and made a config option to turn off all the peripheral crap (calendars, search, archives) – but this then made the regular blog "page" useless.  Customising it was, frankly, a bastard.

And so after a couple of months of S9Y, it was time to move on.  Now the challenge again was What software to use?

Then it hit me, just what is a blog anyway?  It’s a place where I can post a message and others can comment. Sounds like a forum / bulletin board system to me.  I had recently set up a punBB based forum for the ops of the EfNet #php channel and I really liked that for its simplicity and speed.  Poking around on the punBB support forums eventually led me to a couple of modifications: Reply Only forums and PunNewz which makes punBB perfect for blogging (with a fix and a tweak).  Both, by the way, are written by Julian, aka cuteseal, of http://www.shuttertalk.com/.  Kudos to Julian for his work on these.

So there we have it, I now have a bulletin board / forum based blog, PHP based, powerful modding ability and, for now at least, I’m a happy camper.