Some faffing around with Nanoblogger to round things off.

Nanoblogger had initially been so quick it was unbelievable - it took me only a few minutes to get it running, and that included downloading and building the latest version of bash (which I didn't really need anyway). Having had much pain with Wordpress (though it appears to be happy now) I decided that I would come back to Nanoblogger, since much goodness comes straight out of the box. It also generates a static site for you (automatically) so there's no worrying about getting PHP and server-side thigns to work: you just put the pages up and serve them. It even has an option to let you specify the upload command to use once it's rebuilt, so putting up a new entry is simply a case of nb -a -P, giving a title, and editing the text file it gives you.

However, all was not entirely well in the land of Nanoblogger, for a while at least. It turns out that it doesn't handle being in a directory whose name contains spaces, which was of course exactly where I'd put it. The discovery lead to a short session debugging the engine, though it's all in bash, so you can throw bash -x /usr/bin/nb and the usual selection of printf()s (or, rather, echo) at it, which as anyone knows is the only real way anything ever really gets debugged. There was also a short period of head-scratching whilst I realised that I needed to do a full update (nb -u all) in order to fix some permalinks lurking around from the previous three editions I'd been experimenting with.

However, it does now all appear to be "just working", so we'll see how this goes. Maybe it's because I'm a complete shell-head, but this is the only engine I've seen so far (I've also tried PyBlosxom for a few hours) which hasn't taken hours for me to either a) get running on my setup in the first place, or b) fathom out how to put themes in the right place.

Maybe if I'd been with a standard, off-the-shelf web hosting outfit then Wordpress would have been the tool to go with: once it worked, it really did look sweet, and I can see why people like it. But the process of getting it to that state (which wasn't easy), the way that my data's all tied up inside a MySQL database (which I'm no expert at), and the fact that when I decided to move directories, my lack of SQL-fu meant that I had no choice to reinstall from scratch (or spend another hour on Google), all conspired to put me Right Off.

I'm sure there are things about Nanoblogger which will irritate me - everything has to be done from a command-line, and I suspect that fully using categories will at the least require me to pay attention - but it's at least reasonably comprehensible, and doesn't require me to know any more web technologies in order to get it to work. My little circle of campfire-light lets me see as much of it as I want, rather than the ends of those few of its tentacles that poke in at me out of the darkness.