Too late to Blog???

posted by Allan@TechCrammer @ 5:07pm, Wednesday 29 October 2008.

I have been in the IT industry for over 14 years and consider myself to be "techy". However, this is actually my first attempt at creating a blog.

About 8 years ago, a young junior developer showed me some IIS/ASP work he was doing on the side. As a hobby he was logging personal events, such as his trip to Europe and some work related topics. The website has a very nice presentation and he was very talented with graphics and layout. However, for content it didn't seem to be very "sticky", which was I think the buzzword we used at the time :)

Now it seems everyone has a blog and can highlight any subject under the sun... and more. So where should I start with my blog? Searching through some advice and other blogs, it seems for a blog to really catch on you need to select a niche that you can get excited with and really enjoy posting; in turn if this information can be of interest to others, then a healthy discussion can take place.

For me personally, it seemed best to go forward with a "tech" related blog, since that has been my general work field and hobby for many years. Looking back to my experiences, I may possibly be able to share some thoughts and events that could entertain or provide some useful advice to others. What is there to lose in trying?

Now, comes the hard part. Code from scratch? Use some Open Source tools? Or use a hosted service?

Though I am a self-proclaimed avid PHP/MySQL developer, I really didn't think my time would allot for me to bust out the "vi" editor and just go! Even with some pre-built classes for authentication and database interaction, I thought it best to go with either hosted, or an open source package at this point.

Yes, I can be a bit lazy, so before doing any "work" I decided to play with some of the hosted solutions for blogging. I spent some time with the obvious Google "blogger.com" application (these guys are going to take over the world some day!). It was slick and user-friendly and had some well thought out features, though I wanted a little bit more "code" control. Once again, going back to my lazy attributes, there are plenty of blogs using hosted services that still look very unique, though I honestly just didn't want to spend learning the style changes.

About 4 years ago I installed the MovableType.org software for one of my clients, when I was working for a Web hosting firm. I remember it being easy to install and the client, without much web experience, was able to complete some nice customizations in a short period of time. When I started looking into this, I found the commercially hosted TypePad.com and trialed this.

I can't put my finger on why, but I generally liked this solution better than blogger.com. And really put a few hours into it here and there by demoing the pro version. Also a slick and intuitive interface. I submitted a support ticket on Sunday morning and received a response the same day which I find very nice, especially since I was in my free trial period. However, I again couldn't get past my laziness to "learn" this application also. There is a whole community of tips and tricks and knowledge bases, though I still felt I didn't have the control that I needed. Can anyone say "Control Freak?".

So on for the search of the Open Source (or Commercial product), preferably written in PHP or Perl using a MySQL or PostgreSQL backend. I can't remember exactly which ones I briefly looked at, some I downloaded and went through installing and didn't like. Until I finally stumbled across the one I am using to post this blog, EggBlog.net. I have been using it for a few days and still tweaking some visual elements. It certainly saves alot of time vs. coding from scratch and allows me the flexibility I need. I am not sure of the overall maturity or popularity of the product, though I am quite satisfied for what I am doing right now. There may be a couple features that I need in the future, but I like to keeps things simple and this is just right for me. If this works out I will certainly be donating code and/or monetarily to the project. The code is layed out nicely and I can navigate fairly easy and found just a couple spots when I had some database errors, that were easily fixed.

Happy Blogging!

-Allan

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