martinwinter.com/blog

I’m very busy right now and need to focus on a few things. I plan to continue this blog in March 2007. Until then, you might like to have a look at some photos.

Added on December 14, 2006:

• ProChrist 2006

Added on December 13, 2006:

• Savants and Asperger Syndrome

Added on December 6, 2006:

• Powers of Ten

Added on December 4, 2006:

• Arca Musurgica

Added on December 2, 2006:

• KrazyDad

After getting my blog started with Blogger, I quickly looked for an alternative more suitable to my needs. Blogger is nice and free, and you can even have your blog on your own domain if you have one. However, there are some drawbacks to using Blogger:

• no categories for organizing posts
• because all pages are static HTML, the entire blog needs to be rebuilt every time you modify anything
• the main database is still stored at Blogger, even if you host the blog pages yourself
• limited customization (I admittedly didn’t start to investigate thoroughly)

After a short interlude trying NanoBlogger, a nice command-line–based blog engine for UNIX geeks, I looked at some of those giant blog comparison charts, read a couple of reviews, and decided to go with WordPress. It is available as a free hosting service, just like Blogger, as well as an open source project for self-hosters, which would be me. What is so nice about WordPress?

• categories, even multiple per post
• dynamic generation of pages from a MySQL database, using PHP templates – this means you can modify anything and see changes instantly!
• completely customizable, including writing your own PHP functions if you are so inclined
• excellent user interface (very important to me), both in terms of looks and usability
• very light and small (less than 600 KB zipped)
• installs in less than five minutes, provided you have PHP and MySQL activated on the server
• local install possible (requirements are the same)
• does not (yet) officially support multiple blogs, but can simply be installed in several locations at no cost – it’s free

The only thing that is a bit cumbersome in my case is that I need to keep two copies of almost anything synchronized; one for the English version of my blog, one for the German version. On the other hand, several things must be localized for the language anyway, so it’s only a problem with style sheets and functions which are language-agnostic. Everything else is so nice that it makes me smile every time I write a post.

In a later post I will give detailed instructions on how to install WordPress locally on Mac OS X, so you can save the couple of hours it took me to figure out why I couldn’t get a database connection.

Dear reader, welcome to my blog! After much consideration and hesitation, I decided to just go ahead and jump into the waters of the blogosphere. This will be a place for thoughts and observations, a journal of sorts. (Also, it will be good for practicing my English.) How often and what exactly I will publish remains to be seen, since I am quite busy with my university studies … In any case, I’m looking forward to this new experience and to hearing from you.

Update/Hinweis: I have decided to publish my blog simultaneously in English and German. Ich habe mich entschlossen, mein Blog gleichzeitig auf Englisch und Deutsch zu veröffentlichen.