Well, my blog is finally online. It's been over two years since the the word "blog" appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, and here I finally am.

Shout out to Gavin, whose own blog was the final tipping point for me to get off my ass and get a blog going.

Being the geek that I am, surely you did not expect me to blog about anything other than the blogging software I chose to go live with... did you? Well, I've been grappling with this decision for a while. My friend Tom Bridge suggested I go with MovableType or WordPress. Gavin was using the same hosting provider as I do (go go Geckowerx!) and MT as well, so that was my first choice.

That got derailed quickly because the folks at Six Apart can't seem to ensure their download links actually resolve to the appropriate tar.gz. *shrug*

I don't get motivated to do personal technology projects very often (c'mon, it's taken me years to even start looking at blog software), so I wasn't going to let Six Apart's snafu stop me from blogging. I started to do some digging, and ended up at O'Reilly's perl.com site, where contributor Simon Cozens mentioned fellow O'Reilly contributor Rael Dornfest's Blosxom blogging software.

From an "MVC" perspective, Blosxom's "model" is the text file, the "view" is the header/footer HTML snippets I already had from the rest of the stuff here on khan.org, and the "controller" is the blosxom cgi. Simple. Elegant. What more could you ask for? (Actually, it sucks to have to login in order to blog, but there are plugins that promise to extend "control" via Web browser and email so when I get that set up, I can blog from anywhere!)

If all that sounds complicated, the point is that this blog entry is as simple as writing a text file that looks like this:

First Post!
Well, my blog is finally online. It's been over two years since the the word "blog"
<a target="_new" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog">appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary</a>,
and here I finally am.<br />
...

It didn't hurt that Rael promised I'd have my first entry up in under 15 minutes (or my money back). This beat the list of items I'd have to go through for MT (and presumably a whole host of other blogging utilities), including setting up a MySQL database, installing a raft of Perl libraries on a box I only have root access on as a courtesy, etc. etc.

I haven't dug into the code, but Blosxom seems to be written and designed the way I was tempted to write my own solution until I stumbled across Blosxom. Thank goodness I was lazy enough (as in the "Three Virtues") to run across Blosxom before re-inventing the wheel!