I Need a New Blog
I Need a New Blog.
This one is largely an unfocused repository for whatever I happen to have to say at the moment. And while that was the original intention, it’s not an optimal solution. So, I’ve decided to break my writings up into the following categories:
- Technical articles - How-to’s, explanations, tips, etc. This will probably be the meat of my writings.
- Personal happenings - Sort of a family newsletter idea. Interesting to relatives and close friends; terribly uninteresting to everyone else.
- Snide Remarks - Political commentary, opinions, editorials, that sort of thing.
Perhaps there’s more to add, but that should be enought to get along with. I’m pretty sure I’ve got some interesting stuff to say, but one of my primary problems is that it never seems relevant to the subject of my blog… probably because my blog has no subject. Do my latest .NET coding tricks belong here? How about my musings about some bit of software I’ve been trying out? I don’t know.
I would like to have everything hosted on my site: it sure helps my search engine ratings–my personal website is actually ranked higher than my employer’s; higher than most people’s, for that matter (5 of 10 by Google), meaning that most of what I write about becomes “important” in web searches if it’s not too common a topic.
Since I’m going to be changing things around, I’d be interested to hear about alternatives for my blogging software. I’m using Wordpress right now; It’s nice and all, but I would like a bit more direct control over the content formatting. Less like blogger, more like Slashdot, if that makes sense.
Wiki-based systems are somewhat attractive if you can make the paradigm work. Wordpress is always an option. I expect that this may become my new homepage, so it should be highly customizable with minimal hacking.
More on this is probably to follow once I get more figured out.
What can’t you control about the appearance with WordPress? It’s all in the stylesheets. Or are you saying you want more GUI control?
Comment by Henrik — August 14, 2006 @ 2:29 pm
When I said “content formatting” I meant direct control over the HTML code generated for stories. While most people are interested in having the system generate the markup, I prefer to write directly in HTML. This becomes even more important once you step outside of writing only simple paragraph-wise prose. And I HATE how wordpress automatically translates carriage returns to <br> tags.
But yes, I’d also really like to have full UI control over my site. I’d like to make my blog part of my website, rather than make my website fit into my blog. I wrote my own Wordpress theme, but that only takes you so far.
FWIW, django is looking like the optimal way to build this sort of web application with minimal effort.
Comment by tylerl — August 14, 2006 @ 3:49 pm