Welcome to my mostly coherent rants

Almost daily musings

The typical life span of a blog seems to be around 2 years. Well I hope I last this one will last that long.

For the time being the rantings are about movies, anime, photography, books, Japan, cats, gadgets, otakus or whatever takes my fancy. I really don't have the stamina to do review of a movie, book or music, so I am kind of jumping on the easy road and trying to do these as blog entries. Not that I have done anything yet, while I am writing this, but I sure intend to do some, sometime in the future. Really ... I think. Until then I will just post my thoughts (or rants) about the above subjects.

The blog can be found here.

Blog beginnings

I started out by using the 'built-in' blog for domains hosted by my site provider One.com. They have set up a really easy beginners blog, that just requires a few decisions on the bloggers part and then you are up and running.

The negative part of this is then that there is little flexibility unless you start working with style sheets, and in that case one might as well go for something like Wordpress instead.

Blog for the future

Unfortunately it just took 21 days for me to get bored with the 'built-in' blog.

This does not mean in anyway that it is a bad feature. It is a great and easy non-technical introduction to creating a blog on your own domain. It has all the basic functionality needed including the possibility to only allow registered users to comment. Many people will not need anything more than this.

But my inner geek has been showing his 'ugly' head a few times since I started blogging, like eg. ”I need the ability to embed videos”, ”I need to be able to list the latest comments separately”. Not features that are neccessarily required, but they would be nice to have. But for a true geek 'nice to have' soon becomes 'must have' and goes on (in my case within 21 days) to become #absolutely need and cannot live without”.

So googling around, and also checking towards compability with my site provider, I fell upon what seems to be the solution to my 'needs', WordPress.

It has an acceptable license: WordPress is licensed under the GPL. It just requires platforms that are available to me on my site: PHP (v4.2 or newer) and MySQL (v3.23.x or newer).

WordPress should have a reasonably easy installation, and has among other things support also for offline creation of posts – at the moment I am using OpenOffice writer to create the post, then do a just-in-case copy via Notepad to the webbrowser where it is finally posted.