bobpeers -> blog

To be honest up until I started this blog I knew very little about blogging software. Sure I had heard of MoveableType, Wordpress and Blogger but as far as which was best for me and how they actually worked I was clueless.

I knew I wanted a few things from the start.

1. GPL Licensed
2. Hosted on my own host.
3. Running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
4. Fairly easy to install
5. Extensible and hackable if I want to make my own changes.

I try to use free software whenever possible these days. My laptop is actually a dual boot windows XP Professional / Fedora 8 machine but I can honestly say that I boot into Windows less and less. The last time was probably a couple of months ago when I had to develop something work related requiring Office 2003.

I wanted to host my own site just because I like the flexibility this affords. Domains are very cheap these days and hosting is also cheap, especially if you don’t require huge bandwidth or space. This way I get to write my own htaccess file and change the way the host works as I see fit.

It had to be LAMP because I run a development server on my laptop with the same setup so it’s great for me to install the same software locally and test with different setups. Also if I make more radical changes to the code I don’t break things on the main site (even though this sometimes happens when I screw up, usually making chages too late in the evening!.

Easy to install just because even though my main site is all coded by me in PHP I didn’t feel l ike spending ages reading how to use the software first. I’d rather install, use, and then learn more about it over time and if I feel like delving deeper to make code changes then I can do so at a later date.

It seemed after some research that Wordpress fit all these needs and I’m glad I made this choice. Installing was a breeze, it probably took me 20 minutes and that was going slowly to make sure I didn’t miss a step. I think if I had to install it again it would take 10 minutes at most.

If anything there’s too much choice when it comes to extensibity. With over 1,600 official themes and nearly 1,500 plugins listed trying to find exactly what you want (especially when as a newbie you’re not sure what plugins you might want)is pretty difficult. As a result I’m starting off slowly with only a few plugins to stop comment and trackback spam, probably my two biggest worries about blogging.

The biggest change for me is letting go and relying on plugins written by other people where I’m not really sure how they work. After developing my own site and knowing the code backwards it’s a strange feeling to suddenly be just a user of sortware and not a developer. Still it’s either this or reinventing the wheel so I guess I’ll have to get used to it.