Weblog Creation

This is the third time I’ve tried to set up a web­log. Maybe this time I’ll actu­ally feel happy enough with the res­ults that I start pub­licly using it, rather than bog­ging down installing and testing. 

Unlike many people I know, I decided that my main reas­on for blog­ging was to blog, rather than to code a blog­ging sys­tem, and that I had no great desire to do so (using someone else’s work and then tweak­ing to suit my needs has always appealed). So I set out to find what soft­ware there is out there that I like the look of, and could install on the box in the base­ment which is my web server.

I tried Noah Grey’s Grey­mat­ter, but that isn’t being main­tained very actively.

Sam Ruby sug­ges­ted I try Blosx­om, which I did, but that would have required rather more tweak­ing to do what I wanted than I felt like, par­tic­u­larly since there is a new ver­sion in the works.

By dig­ging around and fol­low­ing serendip­it­ous links, I came across Word­Press. It took rather more than the prom­ised 5 minutes to install (does­n’t it always) and rather more fid­dling around with httpd.conf than prom­ised as well, but even­tu­ally I got it up and running.

This web­log is the result. 

Now the fun of fid­dling XHTML tem­plates and CSS styles and think­ing about which hacks to install (yes, they call them hacks, although it looks like they will even­tu­ally be called plu­gins) is about to des­cend; expect the look and feel of this site to change as I have time to do this stuff.

For the time being I’m not enabling com­ments, track­backs, or ping­backs. Maybe one day. In the mean­time, feel free to send me email.