Blogging with Blogger

The last post turned out be quite popular and more than 20 people requested me to add a "comment facility " . The choice was between (1)run a mysql based blogging app on my website or (2) go with a hosted version .

I first looked at WordPress .I even installed and ran it .While it is a very impressive in terms of fucntionality , I really hate PHP and the thought of mucking around with PHP to make minor tweaks to the site is disgusting. I had to dig around in the template files('sidebar.php' for those who want to know) and change the feed indicator to remove an extra "feed:" string that gave a result of "not a valid protocol" when i tried to get the feed from bloglines. From what little I understand of this issue it seems that WP is on the "cutting edge" but the aggregators haven't caught up yet , or some such nonsense .
And of course once I tweak the template I am locked into it because the other templates still have this "feed:" rubbish hard coded in .

I next considered Typo . The biggest advantage Typo has is that its is written in Ruby, and built on top of Rails which add all kinds of goodness . If anyone is not convinced of the superiority of Ruby Vs Php I suggest they take a look at the source code of Typo and then the corresponding PHP code in WordPress. The only reason i didn't put my blog on Typo is that I have a sense it is evolving *very* fast and i would like it to reach a point of stability .
That leaves other yucky systems written in perl or hosted solutions where you don't have to bother too much about what is under the hood . Since I hate perl almost (but not quite) as much as i dislike PHP , I decided to look for a fairly minimal free hosted solution .Blogger meets all my needs . I am not sure it supports trackbacks and pingbacks but I am ambivalent about this whole "blogosphere / social text" meme anyway .All I need for now are permalinks and commenting (and i may yet turn the latter off ) and blogger has both .

The one thing I would like to have had are categories . But on second thought, I haven't subscribed to any category speciic urls . I may just spawn a new blog if i need one for a separate category .And knowing the quality of the people at google, I am not too concerned about the software crashing etc.

Anyway that's the story . I moved most (but not all) of my old blog entries here,tweaked the template a bit to make permalinks explicit and everything looks good .I still need to figure out how to put up an rss link . Bloger seems to use Atom .

But so far so good .

let us see how it goes .