lukeintas.net For the stuff that's too long for social networking sites…

For quite a while now I’ve been neglecting my blog. With the growth of facebook (in particular) and twitter personal blogs seem to have become a thing of the past. If you don’t have something to share with the masses, then social networking sites really do seem to be a better way to share with your friends, especially friends who aren’t techo nerds.

But the social networking sites don’t really allow you to tell stories in the way that a blog does either. facebook might have ‘notes’, but the functionality just isn’t quite the same.

So having decided there is a benefit to maintaining a blog I have just created this new WordPress-hosted blog to, hopefully, overcome the other reason I’d neglected my blog—that being my previous blogging software and hosting. Previously I’d been using an application called RapidWeaver to maintain my blog, which was published to my MobileMe account. RapidWeaver is an excellent web site creation tool, but as my blog became larger it was harder to publish—RapidWeaver blogs are made up of static pages, rather than drawing on a database to store the posts. As a result, when publishing a new entry it was necessary to republish every existing entry, which was a fairly clumsy exercise. But with no database or php support on MobileMe my only other alternative was iWeb, which shares issues that limit the spontaneity of posting.

These issues made me realise I needed a database-powered blog, and preferably one that facilitated spontaneous posting. Having looked at some of the available options (e.g. WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Squarespace) I’ve decided on WordPress for the time being. This decision was based mainly on cost (I’m still paying for MobileMe), features (e.g. ability to have additional non-blog pages, flexibility in the layout of blog entries, and blog comments), and the ability to post more spontaneously (from the web, my iPhone, or from a native OS X application—I’m testing out Blogo at the moment).

The test now will be whether I maintain this new blog or whether it also falls into disuse (for the time being my old blog can be found here—I’ve yet to decide whether to try and migrate my old posts).