I've moved my blog to: http://regex.info/blog/

Yahoo!360 was sufficiently well done (and sufficiently easy to get started with) that it got me to start the blog I'd been wanting for ages. But once Y!360 got me hooked on the drug that is blogging, it didn't follow through with enough features to satiate my needs. I realize that it's a beta product, of course, but a blog is a very, very sticky, all-or-nothing thing, and if it doesn't have enough features, well, it doesn't have enough features.

The most unforgivable lack is that of view statistics. Have 1,000 people seen my latest bit of written inspiration? Or 100,000? Or even 1? I have no idea — Y!360 doesn't tell me.

It's also fairly unforgivable that there is no notification (e.g. email/IM) when someone comments on a post. If you've got 10 or 100 or 1,000 posts and want to see what comments are left, you must inspect each post for them.

More forgivable, but still exceedingly annoying, is that you can't put images inline with a post. You can only upload images from your local machine (you can't upload from a url), and at most one per post, which appears at the top. I can imagine various security / implementation reasons why they chose this limitation, at least for the first round. It wouldn't surprise me if they lift this restriction in the future (but then, by then, it'll be too late for me).

When deciding to host the blog on my own server, I had to decide what software to use. It seems that the two main contenders are Movable Type (MT) and WordPress (WP). MT was the name I knew, but WP was recommended to me, and a perusal of various commentary articles indicated that WP had more features. So, I went with it.

WordPress was easy enough to get set up and start working with, but the more I looked at it, the more I couldn't believe how poorly engineered it is. (Well, it's written in PHP, so what should I expect?). I seriously considered bailing on it and just writing my own blogging software, but unless I want to get serious about it and release it as a real project, it's probably just better to try to diddle things as minimally as possible and spend my time elsewhere (like writing, or playing with Anthony, or doing the dishes, etc.)

I mean, these people (who develop WordPress) don't even know how to keep track of time. It has a nice feature where you can use different themes (I wrote my own, so the style, or lack thereof, of my blog is my own fault), and the default theme has some commented-out code for displaying a “2 hours ago” type message along with a blog's post date. It's commented out because it doesn't work unless you happen to be in the same timezone as the guy who wrote it. Actually, let me be more specific in that it's not the writer that has to be there, but the server hosting your blog (which may be halfway around the world from where you are, as is the case with me). It's simply moronic. At least it was commented out.

Some day soon I'll write a blog entry about how to keep track of time and temporal events like blog posts. Maybe the WordPress people will see it.

Of course, WordPress is free and likewise, I'm free to not use it. I understand that. But that doesn't mean I can't complain 🙂