So I think I’m going to try and use Wordpress after all. While I fondly used blosxom for almost three years [the beginning][the end…maybe], I found it got harder and harder to maintain since I have less and less time to write Perl scripts. It has even got to the point where I find it cumbersome to sync my local archives (where I do my posting) with my live blog since I pretty much use both my desktop computer and my laptop for blog posting. I just don’t have the energy to dig through the man pages of rsync and cvs to try and figure out how not to nuke my file system.

But this could all be a temporary flash-in-the-pan fling. The last time I tried changing my blog engine from something that I could semi-understand to something more industrial strength, I chickened out, although, granted, this was before the current manifestation of blogging (and the now near-ubiquitousness of free or supremely cheap hosting) had taken wing, and everyone was really thinking of Slashdot-like forums and big time content management systems instead.

But as usual, I digress. (Hence the new blog title.)

Anyway, I’ve got to tell you that I’m still a little leery of storing all my content in a SQL Server. Thankfully, the beauty of having a major webhost like DreamHost is that it’s not impossible to undo stupid changes you’ve made to your site. (Although how I revert a SQL Server is currently beyond me, and hopefully it’s not something I’m ever going to have to do. I’m crossing my fingers and knocking on some wood.) Not that storing all your content in a UNIX filesystem like Blosxom does is exactly idiot-proof either, but it’s certainly more familiar.

Another of the reasons why I’ve changed my mind and am now willing to give it a go, though, is that I found this interesting—hmmm, what is the word for it—concept, I guess. First of all is the FUSE project, which is a framework that lets you create unique filesystems completely in userspace without having to muck around in the kernel (which, while theoretically possible in Mac OS X/Darwin, is not something I would want to try. Hell, the thought of recompiling my own Linux kernel kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I used to do that, oh, once a week, whenever Alan Cox would release a new patch. Just for fun, like the sick little monkey that I clearly am.) Oh, sure, I know, you do have to patch your kernel to get it to work in the first place, so that also led me into virtualization so that I could try to run Linux on top of MacOSX. Unfortunately, Mac-on-Mac, which I would expect to be the most efficient, apparently doesn’t run on Tiger, nor can it run Tiger, making it less than ideal. I suppose I could try compiling it and seeing what sort of havoc it can wreak on my computer, but again, I just don’t feel as ready for this sort of misadventure as I used to be. Another cool sounding idea is Xen, which unfortunately isn’t really quite running on the PPC platform yet (although such a port is in process as we speak), and I can’t quite afford a MacBook Pro which in fact has an x86 processor (and in any case, I probably wouldn’t be able to run Tiger x86 in Xen.) So what I need is an x86 machine, or infinite patience and 40 GB more of hard drive space so I can try running an x86 Linux on MacOSX through QEMU [the main site][the PPC port][MacOSX application]

Anyway, the point. (Is there ever, ever a point to any of my blog posts?) Once I get a working copy of Linux patched with FUSE one way or the other, I can install BlogFS, which will let me see my Wordpress blog as a filesystem, thereby emulating blosxom, and coming full-circle in what must seem like a completely pointless endeavor.

Not so! This now gives me the transparency of the filesystem that I so adored in blosxom and yet allows me to use the advanced features of Wordpress, including being able to post in a webbrowser without having to screw around with another thousand lines of perl.

But that really does look like a good 60-80 hours of mucking around in source code (not to mention scrounging up free hard-drive space from somewhere) so it’s probably going to be a while before I get to it. In the meantime, I’m just going to stare at the shiny new thing that is my Wordpress blog.