The long battle for decent blogging tools.

Ok, I'm the first guy to admit that I'm a computer geek. I have a pretty good background in the field, as well as several years of schooling. I'm the sole maintainer/builder of my site, have some basic programming skills, and am generally just a technically adept guy particularly where computers and all things related to them are involved.

So, when I decided that my website might benefit from some dynamic content, I figured a blog page might be nice. I started looking into what it takes to actually build and maintain a blog, and I gotta tell ya, it is entirely too complicated. Bear in mind, I'm pretty adept at computers/internetworking/web design, so when I'm saying that it's too compicated, I mean just that. I feel badly for anyone who's a beginner trying to start one of these. My biggest beef is, there is no simple way to start a blog that isn't "hosted". That is, if you don't mind your blog sitting on someone else's server and thus subject to their size/content/formatting rules, no problem. If, however, you have your own server/domain and you want your blog to reside on it, buckle up for a long drive.

The most obvious choice (I thought) would be Blogger . Their package is supposed to be able to publish your blog to your own FTP server. Well, I tried it, numerous different ways, and I could never get it to publish to my server. Yes I had my firewall ports open for PASV FTP, yes I had my FTP client configured properly, yes I had the "Publish" settings on Blogger's site configured properly....it just flat out wouldn't work. I'd get time-out errors. My FTP logs would show that a session was opened via Blogger, but nothing would transfer. I could FTP in to my box from anywhere on the net via Firefox but for some reason, Blogger just wouldn't do it.

So, I started looking around for other clients/hosts that allowed for so called "remote hosting". Let me tell you, it's slim pickings. There were several clients out there, most of which had to run as, essentially, another server on my Linux box. Now, I admit, despite being a computer geek, I am still learning the finer points of Linux. I'll speak about my experiences/thoughts on Linux in another entry (especially for those of you who aren't familiar with it, but it rules!!) Anyway, I wasn't quite sure how to install deploy some of the other requirements that came along with some of the "Open Source" Linux clients (i.e. MySQL, Python, PERL, etc). So I started looking for Windows clients (I know you other geeks out there are blasting me for even mentioning Windows, but despite my love of Linux, I still need Windows for a few applications, particularly pro-audio stuff).

I tried several of these Windows packages, and most had ridiculous costs associated with them. Sure they were pretty, robust, and had many more features than I needed, but all I wanted was a way to ramble and post.....DONE. Finally I found Thingamablog . I LOVE IT. It's small, it's simple, it lives on my Windows box, it plays very nicely with my FTP client, it's fast, it has nice templates with it (like the lovely SlashDot template you see here....yes I did that intentionally....I told you I was a computer geek). In short, it is exactly what I was looking for. It's sad that it took so long to find. I literally had to look for a few weeks to find it. So if anyone out there is in a similar situation, give them a shot, I really recommend them.

Well, that's enough for now. Lily's gonna need a bottle soon, and I don't want her to get cranky.