The Old Weblog

This post is inspired by NuclearMoose’s wonderful account of his migration from Blogger to Greymatter and eventually to WordPress.

My personal blog journey started sometime in early 2003. I was introduced to the blog phenomenon by a small news item I read about a certain takeover.

Google had just bought over a small company called Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that had created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs.

This was a small piece of news that had found its way to me via Google News. I had never heard of the term weblog before and so was naturally curious to find out more. I found myself doing the first thing any computer literate person probably does on hearing a new word. Yup, I Google(d) the word weblog. I found myself hit by so many search results that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of this term before.

It didn’t take me long to signup for a Blogger account once I had read through various online encyclopedia definitions of the term weblog. My first few posts were mere ramblings at best. I had no clue what I was supposed to use this new medium for. I had read some weblogs sparingly, and they all seemed just ramblings to me. It was a very confusing time.

On one hand there seemed to be a lot of interest and hype about this new phenomenon and on the other, every blog I visited had some random musings by the author. I kept asking myself, “What is the big deal about this?”

The answer came to me quickly. Once I had spent a couple of months following a few blogs. I realized why this medium was catching on.

You see, to a new user, a blog at first glance can seem a bunch of disorganized thoughts laid out by the author. Each entry has little connection with the next. However, as I soon found out, each blog evolves in its own time and going through well archived blogs gives you a tremendous insight into the personality of the blog.

So I continued with Blogger for a while, just typing out random things that happened during the day. For a lack of direction, this rudimentary blog of mine was turning out to be a very loosely bound online diary. It was hosted on Blogspot, the free hosting provided by Blogger and sported the most common template of the early Blogger days, Sand Dollar by Jason Sutter.

All this was before I was introduced to web design using CSS, but thats a different story.

So continued my blogging story with Blogger until March, 2004 when I began to feel the lack of features in Blogger hitting me. I had become more involved in reading other blogs and had begun to miss a few features that bring out the beauty of blogging. Namely,

• Visitor Comments
• Post Categories
• Syndication (this one Blogger did have, but I didn’t know how to use it)

Right around then, I stumbled upon Monty’s blog that was hosted on LiveJournal at the time.

LiveJournal had a few features that I had missed in Blogger, namely the commenting features and the ability to have syndicated feeds. It also had the strong sense of community through the friends feature. All of these lured me strongly towards it and on March 12, 2004 I made the switch to LiveJournal.

Life was good and I was enjoying LiveJournal quite a bit, until Niket Kaisare came along and introduced me to web design using CSS. Once I began dabbling with CSS based web design, there was no turning back. I began to see clearly how LiveJournal was lacking in this vital area. It did have styles that one could apply to a blog, but the functionalities were drastically limited. One had to upgrade to a paid version of the system to unlock these.

Unable to control my urge to have my weblog look the way I wanted it to, I began exploring Blogger once more. I found out that they allowed you to use any template you wanted and even use any CSS file for your design. This, along with the ability to publish your blog on your own server allowed me to re-design my weblog based on my preliminary knowledge of CSS.

I was now quickly learning about the various subtleties of CSS based webdesign (and still am, everyday). I was using w.bloggar to make my posts on Blogger and was extremely happy with seeing my blog look the way I wanted it to.

Once again my blogging life was looking good until I was bitten by the categories bug. I quickly found out that I needed to sort out my posts by categories. The need was not only for my own sanity but also to make my blog easier to browse by a visitor. I was begining to see the need to have a website that was visitor-centric rather than author-centric. This idea, as I found out soon, was the central basis of having standards based web-design.

And so my blog journey continued with a search for a new blogging solution. I had no experience in PERL, PHP, website hosting etc. So a number of blog solutions that I came across were immediately being struck off the roll.

Monty then came back to my rescue and showed me how easy it was to begin managing one’s own webspace account using the CPanel that almost every webhosting provider has installed for the user. This made me finally purchase my own webspace and come April, 2004, I had this website up and running.

This time my weblog was hosted on my own webspace and powered by WordPress. Due to my lack of knowledge in installing PHP scripts, I had to fall back upon using Fantastico to install WordPress.

A number of my teething problems in using WordPress were sorted out by the vibrant community over at the WordPress support forums. This resource is easily one of the most active and friendly communities that one can ask for in an open source initiative. A community effort like WordPress is what brings out the beauty in open source software.

I’ve now been using WordPress version 1.01 for just under two months and have been able to tweak it around in a number of ways, including application of custom hacks and installing a photolog. The more I use WordPress, the more I feel like helping out others to get onto it. The simplicity in use of the base installation surpases any hosted solution like Blogger or LiveJournal by far. I am not an expert on other blogging solutions like Movable Type, TextPattern and Serendipity but I’m sure you can find various resources for such a comparison, starting here.

I plan to get my WordPress installation upgraded to a newer version soon. This decision will be based solely on the amount of time I can spare to take the care in going through the upgrade process. As it looks right now, I might only get around to doing it in the early part of 2005.

Until then, WordPress 1.01 is suiting me just fine. I’m happy with the way it functions and it’s giving me tremendous amount of satisfaction without any hiccups. And when they come by, they quickly get sorted out with a quick visit to WordPress support.

That is why I WordPress!