Blog

Contrary to my previous post, I’m back on a self-hosted wordpress weblog. The main reason for the change is that Google are discontinuing support for (s)FTP publishing in late March.

The transition over to WordPress was painless (though I did have to switch away from FTP publishing to make the posts importer work properly) and the admin interface has grown up a lot since I last installed it, I’m very impressed with how clean and efficient it’s become.

I’ve settled on this minimal theme for now, but I intend to make it my own over the next few months. In the mean time, you can hopefully expect more frequent updates as I intend to make this blog a staging area of sorts for my research, a means of clarifying and refining my thoughts.

I’ve been here before, set up a new blog and then proceeded to ignore it.
There’s still a chance of that happening, but this time I’m not deluding myself that this is the new awesome thing (TM), perhaps I’ll get into the habit but likely I won’t.

The difference this time is that I’ve given up on using WordPress for my own blog. I should clarify (after such a flame-bait-ish statement) this isn’t due to anything I dislike about WordPress, rather my own observations about my needs (read: user requirements).

Part of this comes from my ill-advised creation of a university society web-page through a large mangling of WordPress categories and templates. It really was not needed. Sure the website needed a refresh, but only visually, we weren’t that busy a society to warrant a plethora of categories. So, back to basics and reign in the enthusiasm. :)

Maintenance

I said before, I have a tendency not to come back to blogging very often, so while I’m usually in favor of updates for the sake of updates, installing a new version every time I come back to blog briefly is not something I can be bothered to do, but paradoxically rather than ignore it, I opt to not blog instead.

Spam

Spam is a pain and I’d much rather let someone else deal with it than moderate my own comments or find the right plugin to install.

Features

Features are lovely, everyone loves features, but frankly they’re wasted on me, I probably don’t use most of WordPress’s features anyway.

So, the answer is clearly some managed solution, the few candidates that come to mind:

WordPress.com

WordPress is Ok but to be honest I fancy a change, and there’s no point having my domain if I don’t use it.

Livejournal

Livejournal is for some reason too old fashioned for my tastes, plus it’s got a whole layer of social networking and crap which I waste enough time with on Facebook.

Blogger

It’s Google for a start, so they get the benefit of the doubt in the new features department, plus they have a handy thing which lets them publish via SCP to my domain.

Hardly a convincing argument I know, but that’s about as far as I bothered to look.
Anyways, goodbye for now blogosphere, let’s keep in touch.