My first blogging experience was on blogger.com in 2000, where I recounted the experiences of that summer. It was pretty easy to use and wrote to a remote site on a server that I had. After that blog fell into disuse, I wrote on a collaborative blog that used WordPress 1.3 and the b2 theme, hosted on a different server, but still one that I owned. We settled on it because it was pretty easy to install and we could see what was going on under the hood, making it easy to muck about with the layout. After a year or so, we upgraded to WP 2.0 in order to use newer and shinier layouts. This proved to be a disaster, with the end result being an 8 hour session to manually move the content from the old database structure to the new one. When that blog went by the wayside, I focused more on my community of friends that use LiveJournal and moved away from blogs that I had to host myself. After an unfortunate blogging incident, I set all of my entries to friends-only. This is all well and good, but part of the genius of the web is the ease with which ideas are shared amongst people - to include total strangers. So when I saw that "erudity.net" was available, I snatched it up with the intent of getting back to my roots, blogging-wise.
I started by installing Textpattern onto a TextDrive account. You'd think that this would be easy, right? Dean Allen explicitly made the service so that people could use TextPattern as their CMS. Of course, in their transition from self-financed to being owned (pwnd?) by Joyent, a good many things seem to have gone awry. After a bit of wrangling, I got TextPattern up and running with the default template - hooray! Now let's get it looking pretty. And don't get me wrong, there are a lot of really pretty TextPattern templates out there. Which all take a BS in Comp Sci to install. In this day and age there is no reason to have to manually add, edit and delete pages in a CMS setup in order to get a template to work - that's not a template, that's a set of directions for customizing your website. If I wanted to do that, I would have just started from scratch. (Which, incidentally, is exactly what my friend who runs TextPattern recommended.)
So POOF to TextPattern. Call me when you get a usable system for managing design and layout, to say nothing of plugins. I'm now running WordPress again, which is VASTLY improved since I last used it. Now all I have to do is get the dumb "powered by black minimalism" watermark off the top of the layout and I'm set.
