Another change: this new weblog is powered by Greymatter instead of Manila. Nothing against Userland, I just need more flexibility.
Advantages of Greymatter:
- Speed. Adding new entries is almost instantaneous. Pages are rendered at publish time, stored in plain .html files, and served statically by Apache. Static rendering was a high-end option available for Manila, but I’d have to pay too much for it.
- Plain text. Greymatter stores all my posts in plain text files. This opens up all sorts of doors, and minimizes lock-in down the road. (Yes, I am aware that Manila has an XML-RPC interface that would allow me to extract my posts as text.)
- Platform. Runs as a Perl CGI script in Apache. This gives me more flexibility for hosting; everyone runs Apache and Perl, which means I was able to find a kickass host (CornerHost.com) that gives me other stuff I want too (like my own CVS server).
- Flexibility. Greymatter gives me control over every template, including the calendar. The non-customizeable HTML that Manila generates has always bugged me.
- Licensing. Greymatter is open source. One practical upshot of this is that I could install it locally on my Linux box and try it out, set up my templates, etc. before deploying the site.
Advantages of Manila:
- No installation hassles. The flip side of the open source argument above, it means that I had to go with a hosting company that had Manila pre-installed. Installing Greymatter wasn’t hard, but I have years of command line experience and write my own scripts for fun.
- Guessable URLs. I like the year/month/day structure of Manila URLs; it means I can type a URL manually if I know the date.
- Amazing scripting support. XML-RPC, SOAP, and an entire scripting language embeddable in posts. Greymatter is a publishing engine, not a CMS. (But after a few months of using a CMS, I’ve decided all I need is a publishing engine and a few homemade scripts.)
- Built-in RSS support. I had to hack my own into Greymatter.
I fully expect to move to another weblog system before year’s end. When I was first living on my own after college, I used to rearrange my furniture every six months. This feels like that.
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