It’s Valentine’s Day, but since I’m not into this kind of stuff, I spent my time today on updating my site to the latest Habari release. The update process went smoothly and there weren’t adaptations to make. However, while I had a closer look after the upgrade, I found a few issues in my site’s theme and fixed a bunch of glitches in the comment system, the template class functions and few minor things in the main CSS set. Everything should run fine now.

Yesterday I made as small excursion to the Drupal CMS, just out of curiosity. I haven’t looked at it for a few years now, although I constantly run into it, as many high traffic sites such as java.net use it as their publishing platform. To get a grip on it, I ported my current site template to Drupal. Basically it isn’t very hard to create a template, although I had to apply a few tricks to make my template work the way I wanted it. Once Drupal’s concept is understood, it’s pretty straightforward to use it. In order to avoid fiddling with its internals, you might also make use of the vast amount of plugins and themes for Drupal. After all, I’m considering to use it for my next major web project. And before you ask: I have no intention to move away from Habari for my personal site.

Apart from fiddling with web related stuff this weekend, I also finished setting up a new home network at my parent’s house. Everything works fine, Mom and Dad are happy :-)

I highly doubt that you even have noticed that I have left Twitter a while ago. After all, I couldn’t find any gain in using it.

Roughly over a year ago I joined the hype and created an account at Twitter. While 140 characters doesn’t seem that much for posting relevant stuff, it is as sufficient for rudimentary messages as SMS is. After I had initially tweeted a whole lot of random nonsense for a while, pauses between tweets grew bigger and eventually stopped at all after a few weeks.

To some extent it was because I am just too busy (or maybe also too lazy) to keep followers updated about whatever (just see the frequency of my blog posts to see what I’m talking about). But mainly it was because I’m not the one who wants or needs to broadcast every aspect of life publicly.

Twitter might have its uses, e.g. for real-time updates on current events, like elections, sports events and so on. But, seriously, nobody wants to know what you had for breakfast, what beer you are currently drinking, or that you are about to go to the toilet. The inanity of some tweets is surprising.

Personally speaking, I found Twitter is not adding anything useful to my life, rather being another drain of time, no matter if used actively or passively. This has, after all, led me to the decision to stop using it all. I’ll keep my account at Twitter, just in case, but I have officially said “Good Bye” to Twitter.

It took only a few hours (mainly template design) to adapt the Habari weblog software to fit my site. Let's see how well (or not) it works...

For 2009 I've planned to switch the management of my site from plain HTML to a reasonable blogging software in order to bring a little more life to this site.

Now, there are plenty of blogging solutions to choose from and I have used quite a few of them in the past. I used Wordpress for most of the time, but I've also been trying a lot of others (see list below).

For my current site, which is a personal just-for-fun project, I don't expect a lot of traffic and since my blogging will be rather sporadic, I have fairly sparse requirements. In spite of that, I was tempted to use Wordpress again, but since my web host doesn't provide a mySQL database server (which costs extra), that's out of the question.

After investigating a bunch of current blogging solutions, I ended up with Habari which is, although still in its very early stages, a very promising project. It provides all the things I wanted and it runs on SQLite, thus not needing a database server. Additionally it is very easy to customize the templates and I had adapted the site design in almost no time.

I decided to give it an extended try and run it as my new blogging system to see how well it performs in regular use. Since there are already a lot of sites out there that use it, it seems to do quite well. I'll keep you updated on this matter...

Choosing a blogging solution isn't as easy as it sounds. It's a matter of technical and personal requirements, usability, and of personal taste. Below I've compiled a list of the blogging software I've been looking at. If you would ask me for a recommendation I would name Wordpress, Habari, DotClear as my personal favorites. But they may be perfectly unsuitable for your own needs. So, I fear you have to try them for yourself.

List of blogging solutions I've tried (in random order):

• Habari
• Wordpress
• Dotclear
• Bloxsom
• Coranto
• Eggblog
• Flatpress
• Globber
• Greymatter
• Poster
• Lifetype
• Movable Type
• MP:Personal Weblog
• NanoBlogger
• NewsPro
• NucleusCMS
• PivotLog
• Serendipity
• SimplePHPBlog
• Textpattern
• ELog
• RazorCMS
• SNews
• Thingamablog (Desktop Blogging Solution)