Weblog Software

I've been keeping an online journal over at LiveJournal since 23rd February 2002. To support them I actually bought a "Permanent Account" a while back, an example of putting money behind companies and/or services which are useful - even when it isn't required.

After getting into the swing of things there I started the blog which is used upon Planet Debian and have also been enjoying that.

Livejournal is a nice service, and they have great software powering the site. The Livejournal code is available and it is reasonably simple to install. (I've setup a few installations of the codebase, and played with them. I admit I've never run it in anger).

Obviously it is completely overkill to run your own installation of Livejournal - unless, perhaps, you're a school or a large company.

So for my personal blog I use Wordpress.

I don't particularly enjoy using wordpress. To be honest I need only four features/abilities of weblog software:

• The ability to create posts.
• The ability for users to be able to leave comments upon entries.
• The ability to search previous entries.
• The ability to export the blog entries as a feed.

Everything else is utterly overkill. The downside of using Wordpress is threefold:

• Because it is popular there are multiple bots crawling the web and leaving spammy comments.
• Because it uses some funky addressing system any replacement would leave lots of broken links.
• It has historically had a couple of security issues.

I've been telling mysefl for the past few months:

• This software has got to go.
• I'll wait until there is another security hole discovered.

So .. HTML::Template &; CGI::Application will at some point come to the rescue. I'm just not sure when.

I guess this means I've not yet written a bloggin system…. ;)

I want to only cover the basics:

• Multiple users.
• Multiple catagories/tags.
• Comments with a sane anti-spam system.

PS - The Sisters of Mercy rock.

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