Finally! Up and running. The appearance of this site is the end result of a 2-month odyssey...
through many sides of the content management problem.
My thought process went like this: OK, I know enough HTML to know it's a pain in the butt to maintain. So I need some kind of content management framework. I actually have separate development and production Linux environments, and enough technical knowledge to be dangerous, so my initial thought was to host myself. I tried an open source package called Bricolage, and got it up and running, but the degree of customization and hand coding it seemed to require to do anything meaningful was little improvement over doing it all by hand. I needed more of a plug and play framework.
Next I tried Midgard, with the intention of installing Aegir CMS, but even after an investment of 20 hours couldn't get it running. I can't count the times I ran the configure/make/make install triad, struggling continually with the subtleties of shared libraries on Linux, Apache/PHP/MySQL configurations, and so on. If I were still a full time developer I would probably have stuck with it, but my career has moved into new areas and I JUST DON'T HAVE THE TIME.
I also looked at several other solutions, using CMSWatch as a starting point.
Today, I started wondering if a blogging solution wouldn't be sufficient. After all, I am not a full team of editors, writers, and so forth, nor am I doing heavily graphical or database driven work. I just wanted a framework for what is essentially to be a small newsletter.
About 3 hours ago I Googled and read MicroContent News, which gave me some links to blogging solutions. I also was thrilled to see the article Blogs as Disruptive Tech: How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants wich completely supported my abandonment of the heavyweight CMS systems I had been entertaining.
One of the first options to come up was SlashCode, the infrastructure running Slashdot.org. But this was again assuming I would crank my creaky Linux boxes up into a hosting infrastructure.
I pride myself on my technical abilities, but bear in mind I have a 50+ hour/week job and a 3-month old, and a lot to say with very little time. Security issues in running my own Internet-connected server also gave hesitation; I just don't have time to keep up with the patches. So I decided to look for a hosted platform.
I looked at Blogger, which was not up to the job, and Radio Userland, which was almost there but had no story on using my own domain name and just didn't seem to have the ease of use and flexibility I was looking for. I also checked out WebCrimson, which despite my respect for MicroContent News, seemed very immature. Finally, after more Google searching, I wound up with TypePad, which while it requires some compromises is I think a platform I can live with. It has good customizability and I can achieve most of what I want to do, and they have a domain mapping capability in late beta.
Hooray. Now I just have to start working on the content that will make this weblog a useful thing.
-Charlie
