What a long, strange trip it's been
Well, maybe not that long, just 7+ weeks. So I shouldn’t be thinking of Jerry Garcia and Truckin’, even if the Library of Congress deems the song to be a national treasure.
This trip started July 2, thinking that I should (re-)investingate blogging software.
The first stop was considering Movable Type, which was what stuck in my mind as the name of the most prominent current blogging software, but was not much more than a name to me.
Next was getting used to MySQL, a seeming pre-requisite to Movable Type. I used to be used to SQL Server, which my colleagues and I used for Telecom Analyzer, and to mSQL, which we used for Recruiter.
SQL led to a long side trip, with its own Windows 98 virtual machine side trip, leading to creating an NT4 Server virtual machine, recovering all of the prerequisites to Telecom Analyzer and that application itself. Part of that was just to see if I could recover everything (I seemed to succeed) and part specifically to get old Perl scripts for backing up SQL databases. (I still need to automate backup of things I’ve started putting in MySQL.)
Trying Movable Type also led to trying to understand how to make an M.T. blog look like a companion web site. That’s not easy. At least not as I see it. Movable Type seems to aspire to being the entirety of the web site, not just blogs. The template mechanism for changing appearance and layout seems OK as far as it goes, but figuring out to rework the CSS to match an existing set of pages/site was too daunting for me.
Forging on, the relative simplicity of WordPress seemed an appealingly elegant alternative to Movable Type. Though the appearance matching/CSS/template experience was simlar to M.T. these seemed a little less daunting with WordPress. (However, note that this page does not match the appearance of https://technologists.com/.)
However, a fundamental difference between Movable Type and WordPress is built-in support for multiple independent, but related, blogs, as in M.T., vs. orientation toward a single independent blog, as with WordPress. WordPress MU seemingly bridges this gap.
I couldn’t get the 1.2.3 version of WordPress MU to work at all. I decided to forego the seeming elegance of that version and live with multiple installs of standard WordPress. After all, one install takes “only” 6+MB of disk space and sectors are “free“.
That’s the summary trip report, from initial thoughts July 2 to initial post here August 21.