The way this works and some design questions
The way this works, I was standing at a bus stop, waiting on the bus, I mean perish the thought that I will ever ride the 5:02 bus again, and I was starting to get chilly. Behind me, a dramatic event was unfolding, and I was about to write about here, but I popped it all into a scope because it’s just so perfect for explaining some events that are yet to occur.
The design questions are different. Last month’s MacAddict Magazine included a copy of some weblog software called pMachine. Good write up. I’d previously downloaded a copy of it, as well as copies of several other kinds of blog-ware because I was looking for a journal program that did everything I wanted it to do plus make it upgradeable and sustainable.
I do backend tech work on a number of web sites. I’ve installed Noah’s Grey Matter for a couple of friends, and I’ve liked it, except for its annoying behavior of tying up a lot of resources for every little change in the interface. I toyed around with b2, as well, installing it and running it for a couple of days, but I was never quite satisfied as I couldn’t mess around with the interface (or never figured out how to). Then there was Moveable Type, and I never did get it installed properly. As I recall, one Sagittarius pointed out that “an MT installation is a bitch.”
So I spent two hours installing pMachine, and after sifting through their documentation and website forums, I finally got it working correctly. Plus it imported all of the previous entries and popped it all into a database. Like a real web site.
I’ve got to trim a few of the features, plus I’m on that steep learning curve, which, to me, feels a lot more like a half-pipe. But it’s all good, as I’ve learned a few more tricks. Worst part is, I don’t know how reliable MySQL is on this server. Time will tell.
Design questions, what’s important? What’s not important? What can be skipped? How stripped or fully-featured should a web journal be? As it is, I cut down on the categories plus I removed most of the archives as that would just take up all kinds of space.
I do like the part where it collects the IP address of anyone making a comment.
