Inaugural
So, I’m going to give a whirl at starting a personal blog. It’s something I haven’t done since my trip to Europe 2003, the impressions of which I meticulously documented from the computer lab at Universität Innsbruck on a homespun blog and content management system crafted largely for this purpose, which immediately fell into neglect soon upon my return.
Hand-crafted blog software. That was back in the halcyon high school days, when I had time for such things. I did, and still do suffer from a bad case of Not Invented Here Syndrome.
Fear not, no such inventiveness here. The pragmatism of age and occupation has given way to WordPress not appearing to be the evil it once was, even if evil is the term you are moved to apply to the justice my slightly-customised template does to Web 2.0 aesthetics. That’s cool; if you want good web design, talk to this guy.
The main impetus for this is actually to disassociate some of my personal writings from the Evariste Systems Blog as I find increasingly that the topics I wish to write about do not comport neatly with the purpose of that blog, nor necessarily align with what I desire to be official positions of the company from a marketing and corporate identity management standpoint.
So, if you like, stick the RSS feed in your reader of choice.
December 12th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Nothing wrong with NIHS (Not Invented Here Syndrome) when it comes to blogging software. Custom stuff is different and interesting (unlike Wordpress). As a bonus, when the latest XMLRPC vuln for PHPNuke comes out, you don’t have to scramble to update your stuff. Just don’t suffer from that malady with very specific software, like a search indexer…
December 12th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Nothing wrong with NIHS with a lot of things.
Time. Lack of it.
December 12th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Actually, the only thing I really miss about my handrolled blogs/CMSs is the sophisticated threaded comments, along the likes of Slashdot and the Scoop engine.
Of course, the feature was overblown and unused much of the time, as it is designed to scale to a much higher volume of deep, threaded discussion. But I really liked it because it encouraged people to be conversant in a threaded, easily searchable manner. A linear comment stream is a lot more stifling in that regard, even though it works pretty well if only a few people comment.
December 16th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Yes. Youtube’s comment system is even worse - it has pseudo-threads, but they only have two indentation levels - and worse, it only allows 500 characters (yes, characters!) per post.
People complain about Youtube’s comments being full of sub-literate crap, but I think the design decision to have an obnoxious 500 character limit might have had an effect on the level of discourse on Youtube.
That and the fact that people generally use it as a form of cheap entertainment and not as a political or educational forum, of course.
December 16th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Oh and I almost forgot - Youtube’s pseudo-thread feature is just confusing most of the time, since threads are always getting broken apart, so that you see a reply as if it was a new thread.