But I Don’t Want To

Sometimes it would be much easier if I could just accept things they way they are.

I’ve really enjoyed my time getting back into web development on this site. I like being able to type up a little something, click the “Post” button and away it goes to my homepage.

But I’ve found certain things to be rather frustrating. This program that I’m using, iBlog, is great if you just want to type in some text or post a simple image. But if you want to get your hands dirty with a little more HTML like a bulleted list or a blockquote or whatnot, it’s a bit difficult. You have to add extra tags around the HTML. And all the HTML has to be on one line with no returns. Plus iBlog isn’t so great in it’s Rich Text to HTML conversion. Instead of putting <p> and </p> tags around paragraphs, it uses two line breaks. <br /><br /> This isn’t the best form and then when you add in block HTML which has its own line returns built in like lists or blockquotes, you get 2 blank lines instead of one between paragraphs. So then you have to delete the extra returns between paragraphs. And that in conjunction with HTML with no line returns makes very unreadable text.

Plus I have extra features of my site added by outside providers. My search engine is by Freefind. Comments are by Haloscan. The Blog Roll is by Blogrolling, and I’m listed at Technorati. Several of these services use outside Javascript so if their site is down or particularly slow, my site doesn’t work well.

So of course I’ve been investigating other methods of running my weblog. Mac OS X is pretty cool in that it is a UNIX operating system. It comes with Apache web server and PHP already installed. So today I upgraded my PHP to the latest version and installed MySQL and I’ve been playing around with other ways of running my site. I’m thinking about using Geeklog. It’s still going to require a lot of testing but it seems promising so far. By using that instead of iBlog, I’ll be able to handle searches and comments on my own site. And quickly adding new bits of data like additions to a Blog Roll are very easy.

I haven’t decided definitely on what I’m going to do. I also want to look at phpBB, and I should also check out Movabletype–though that one is perl-based. We’ll see. I’m sure whatever I choose, a new roll out would still be several weeks away. So like I said, it would be much easier if I could just accept things the way they are.