blivet.com

Something I forgot to mention in that last post about all the recent site changes is that blog search is now done via Google rather than implemented with MySQL. Which is a good thing for two reasons:

1. I’m not really using a database for the blog anymore. Well, nothing more sophisticated than the file system on my ISP’s server. So there’s no MySQL-style pre-calculated text index with which to leverage.

2. Everybody uses Google anyway and — let’s be honest — they prefer it because it produces better results. Especially when its index is current. And it looks like Google’s ‘bot crawled these pages within the last 24 hours because a search for “Christmas” finds that last post.

Of course, Google may always lag a bit on updating their index of my site but, lucky for you, I’m not prolific enough here for that to really matter. Just more justification for my laziness.

I’ve read that blog neglect is a common problem. Lucky for me it’s easily treatable with over-the-counter medication. Which means I’m posting again just in time for the holidays. Ho, ho, ho.

But it’s not just this post that’s new. Sure, everything looks the same but behind the scenes it’s all done different. Gone are WordPress, PHP, and MySQL. Did I go back to Movable Type? No, they’ve been replaced by a Perl hack of my own making. Why?

First, blog comment spam. The sheer volume of it forced me to remember that I had a blog. And because it’s not a simple thing to globally disable comments in past WordPress posts, I became disenchanted with the whole system — meaning comments, trackbacks, and WordPress itself.

Second, while I still liked WordPress for other reasons, upgrading to version 1.2.2 was going to be a lot of work considering all the hacks I made to the version I was using. It turned out to be far easier to write my own blogging software. Really. Plus, I could make it work just like I wanted from the beginning, without any after-market expenditures.

Third, I get bored easily. I’m a geek and I find hacking on the site more fun than actually doing anything useful with it. Who knows, I’ll probably switch out the whole system again next year. You would think I had attention deficit disorder or something.

In the short term, a few other things changed. Some functionality and content are also gone.

To combat all that spam, the comment and trackback system I enabled almost two years ago has been removed. Although it won’t appear immediately for the entire blogosphere to read, you can still send me email if you want to comment and I may even include it in a post. Because I’ve written the new software myself, and because I’m exceptionally lazy, I haven’t provided a mechanism to display the older, existing comments. Maybe one day I’ll restore them to the archives.

My blogroll has been downsized as well. Not due to some technical limitation but rather a reduction of the list to those sites authored by friends or acquaintances. My apologies if I’ve left you out.

Anyway, now that I’m using all this sleek new software (the power of Vim at my fingertips!), maybe I’ll post something else in the next six months.