Reset, reload, relaunch

One reason I haven’t been posting much lately is that I find I have nothing to say anymore about US politics. My government is engaged in a clandestine, organized project to legalize torture by placing the President and his men above and outside of the law. Nothing I could say would be adequate to the moment.

The other reason is that, dissatisfied with MoveableType and their new license, and overwhelmed by comment spam—even with MT blacklist—I decided a little while back to switch to some other blogging software. I tried out WordPress; nice interface, but it takes 19 queries and up to 10 seconds to render my very short front page. I looked at blosxom, and though I liked a lot of what I saw there, I did not like the choice between aching perl-cgi slowness and annoying static rendering.

So I decided to roll my own. Something like blosxom—no databases, no frills—but written in clean, object-oriented PHP. Took a couple of weekends, but here we are, at the stage where I begin to eat my own dog food.

The stage where I release the package will be coming quite soon; it mainly needs documentation and a suite of example page templates. Not that it is complete—far from it. Current missing features include:

• RSS feeds
• Date-based archives
• Selection of home/index page posts by date range
• A calendar view
• Comments and trackbacks
• Searching
• Posting by xml-rpc
• Pinging other sites on update

Those will be coming along in roughly that order as soon after the first package release as time permits.

Links into the old mt archives are currently broken, as well, which I hope to fix soon. There are also numerous bugs, some large, some small. For instance, post timestamps do not account for timezone differences. But when eating ones own dog food, one may not be too finicky.

Filed under: notes