A Web Life

John December's blog on Web publishing, voluntary simplicity, cities and urbanism, digital photography, life, and various observations

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date	11 Nov 2008 18:00 CST
place	Milwaukee, WI, USA
tags	blog, web, software
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next	I examine blog layouts and design

I start a blog

I'm glad to hear that the blogosphere is dead, and blogging is no longer considered trendy or cool. Now, I feel comfortable starting a blog!

My first work was to examine Word Press. I was able to easily install it on my Web site, but I felt it had too many features and at the same time didn't have some features that I'd like to be able to add and control in a custom fashion. Therefore, I'm developing some simple blog software of my own. I already have my own content management system that I've been cobbling together since 1993 to generate pages of my Web site.

This very simple blog system should integrate in a seamless fashion into my site and allow room for me to incrementally add features as I see fit. I like having the files of the blog on my site so that I can back them up and control them (versus having them hosted on blogger or some other site).

To start, I've modified some simple software that I prepared to do my MKE Album. As there, I want to see how I can integrate my blog posts into existing sites through RSS (like on facebook or plaxo, for example) as well as draw in content from my flickr posts. In a way, I want to prepare this blog in the spirit of my company's mission "to help people tap the special nature of the World Wide Web as a seamless, powerful connector of disparate information sources." The power of the Web seems to be in bringing together many different kinds of things in a seamless way. As such, I think having my own blog system will help me do that, rather than tying myself into software under the control (and inevitable "upgrades") of someone else or a site hosted by another company.

So I don't have many features of this blog--like comments, an index, tags, RSS, and other special features--working yet, but I'll add things as I have time in an incremental and modular fashion.