Champagne Velvet

Organizing my thoughts and trying to figure out what I want to make this thing work. This is an email I sent to Zach on December 21st explaining what/where my thoughts were:

Things I want to be able to do:

• Categories
• Lists (books, movies, music, links, etc.)
• Non-blog pages
• Maybe RSS (I think mostly so that I can have it on my individualized Google page so that it will remind me to post)
• Would love to be able to use a toolbar to highlight text on a page and automatically blog it with the link the way you can with blogger. I know WordPress can use the blogger API but I’m not sure if you can do this. Any ideas?
• Get rid of comment spam
• Stat tracking – click throughs, page visits, etc.
• I’m sure I’m missing some stuff but that’s basically where it starts.

As a programmer, I don’t think I want to be locked into one of the hosted solutions, with blogger being the obvious choice. I’d also like to be able to easily throw up non-blog pages w/o it being a big deal.

Of the software packages, I’m heavily leaning towards WordPress right now – flexibility, ease of setup and open source all key.

I’m very comfortable in a unix/linux environment and have practically zero experience with windows servers so my choice there is pretty easy. Also, I have no PHP or ASP experience right now so I’m going to be learning one either way. This is also a reason not to pick WordPress (coded in PHP) but I’ll learn.

The WYSIWYG packages and “you don’t need to ever touch the code” stuff doesn’t really entice me even though I don’t see myself doing a lot of coding for a while.

MT is enticing and I have a feeling that I would have chosen it had I started two years ago or so. I didn’t research the project enough to know everything that’s going on with it right now but it looks like the free version is no longer being updated and it’s not open source. I also read that it can be more difficult to setup.

As far as hosting goes, I’m looking at the most basic plans on DreamHost and MediaTemple but haven’t gotten tremendously far in that research. GoDaddy somewhat scares me. Shared hosting is obviously more than fine with me.

Since then, Performancing released their fantastic Firefox extension which solves the “blogger API” / toolbar problem discussed above and I settled on DreamHost and WordPress. One holdup was that I decided to wait for the WordPress 2.0 release to avoid any upgrade issues since it was only a couple days away anyway. So far so good…

This entry was posted on Monday, December 26th, 2005 at 3:41 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.