Blogging about Blogging

Humor me on the iterative iterativeness of blogging about blogging.

Well, that may be a bit imprecise: I’m actually on the topic of software used to blog.

On the Server Side

As you may have guessed by now, this blog is powered by WordPress. Like many other WP sites, the Web app itself is written in PHP, and the backend is a MySQL database. And, also, like many other WP sites, it has a few customizations tossed in for flavor.

I had selected WordPress partly because it was recommended by many other folks, partly because the initial installation was fairly straightforward, and partly because I fetched the source code and rummaged around in it a bit. There are plenty of other blogging packages out there; professionally, I’ve deployed several hundred of the Java-based varieties, particularly blojsom and Pebble.

Of course, why should I merely be content with just one blog package? Well, actually, I’m not. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any new packages floating about that may fit in a variety of situations; there will always be great packages that work wonderfully in certain niche scenarios.

A lot of folks enjoy certain blog packages because they allow integration with other types of software, and they support ads and/or adware, various plugins, spyware, etc. I’m still reconciling myself to a public (as opposed to my past history of corporate and internal) blog, so I’ll be scrutinizing things that potentially amount to some sort of revenue generation.

A few areas that really strike my fancy, because of my professional background and specialities in them (obviously!), are commerce opportunities, content syndication, production workflow, and enterprise automation. You may start to notice things trickling onto this blog related to these key areas in the future (just don’t try to hold your breath waiting for them!). Implementation-wise, the vast majority of these integrations tend to use Web service invocations to achieve, so security and accessibility are certainly vital… assessing incoming products or components, or building bits to match, will have to take these into account.

On the Client Side

Since the time I installed WordPress, I’ve been logging in and using the online editor to post. While it’s a passable feature, I’m also accustomed to using a blog client (or “blogging client”) to author and store drafts prior to posting to a blog; in the past, I’ve used w.bloggar on a Windows PC to stage and upload content to a variety of Java-based blogs– again, in an internal corporate setting. But now that I’m out in the real world again, I need to either find myself something reasonably good (and preferably free or cheap) or just create my own. This may be a case of Development in Anger… if I get suitably ticked off that there isn’t anything actually “good enough” for me, I may just cobble something together that meets my needs and then just incrementally improve it as I go along.

One of the things that is important to me in terms of a blogging client is the ability to have the product operate essentially the same way across multiple platforms. Unlike a lot of other bloggers, I routinely use different workstations and notebooks everyday, and I don’t mind having decentralized software running on each as I see fit, so something like a blogging client that behaves consistently throughout would really mesh well with my workflow… So I’ll be rummaging around the Internet looking for this dream app.

N.B.

Maybe this article could use a better title…?

Tagged as: blog, client, server, WordPress