Sean's blog

A little pep talk can work wonders, thanks to Ekompute at WebMasterMalaysia. He has got some interesting projects on the go – check out his wikipedia for the time-challenged: dummipedia.org.

Wanting to get a blog up and running on lolyco.com, I had a quick read of wikipedia (I am predictable) and decided on the basis of what I read there to install b2evolution. b2evolution really is a breeze to install. At first my only grumble was the number of options that are immediately available. With the tutorial content already live, it’s hard to know what to fiddle with first! I gave that 20 minutes or so, and then deleted the lot. The blog looked a bit of a wasteland after deleting the tutorial content, but new posts were easy to add. The multiple blog support seemed to work well too.

After setting up 3 blogs, and posting 5 articles, I came to the conclusion b2evolution had to go. Why? Well, the article editing widget looks like something from 1996, but one can always cut out a rectangular hole in a piece of paper and hold it onto the monitor with clothes pegs if an interface is truly ugly. What really got me though, was the difficulty I had in actually uploading an image and finding a usable link for it, so that it appeared as I wanted it in the article. One method produced nothing at all, besides errors in the webserver log, another produced no errors, but neither did it find the image, leaving me with just the text of the title tag in the article. I clicked on the helpfully-placed ‘Help’ link, and was taken to a page that didn’t help. I even searched for an answer on the Internet, so forgiving am I of open source projects (I use nothing else). I found a few pages, but the solutions struck me as arcane. In a huff, I deleted it (actually I didn’t, but I changed the link in my vhosts configuration, so it’s super-hard to find).

What I’m trying now is WordPress, which I had previously passed over because of the warnings regarding security in the wikipedia article, and it’s lack of multi-blog support. WordPress is also very easy to install, in fact they were both so easy I didn’t notice one being any easier than the other. Once installed, the biggest difference is: WordPress looks nice. Some of the default b2evolution themes looked dated to me. The default WordPress theme looks contemporary and clear, friendly even. First task: create a blog article with an image, since it annoyed me so much on b2evolution. Simple! I am won over. b2evolution stays on my server as long as it takes me to copy and paste the content.

As for multi-blog support, I am using WordPress for multiple blogs, but since the multiple is very low (only single figures planned!) I see no problem installing the reasonably small distribution many times over. With a little vhost magic, courtesy of Apache, all my blogs can have urls like ‘http://blog.lolyco.com/USER’. Perhaps the only drawback at the moment is worry – the WordPress interface appears so simple, I’m worried that it won’t have a feature I want that b2evolution does have. But as the Ghost Rider says: “you can’t live in fear”.