In my quest to create what I would call the ultimate personal blog site
that I can live with for a long time, has made me jump from one blog
solution to another in the past
month. In order to blog, you either need to have blog software running
on your
web host or utilize some of the commercially available web hosts
available on the Internet. I was using a .NET open-source blog solution
called
BlogX from 2003-2004 on my website but it wasn’t as stable as some of
the more popular blog software like MovableType.
My laziness aside, the lack of good editing tools on BlogX was one
reason why I didn't update my blog for almost over a year prior to 2005. It was only coming to MIT that Matti and especially Yoav profoundly influenced my decision to share my thoughts and life with other people online.
To save time, I decided to use a blog host for my blogging needs a month ago. My first free blog host is Blogger,
which I still high recommend to people who wish to start blogging
online. It was free, easy-to-use, and fast, but I wanted more features,
in particular, category. So I went to Modblog,
which has more features but a lot slower and restrictive on how you can
customize your blog. Along the way, I tried other free blog hosts like My blogsite and Typepad
but none met my needs. My blogsite impose an online ad on every
client's blog, it's ugly but the blog hosting is free (well, sort of). Typepad is cool but it's not
free and it's really not as good as Blogger IMHO. I don't know why I
was so insistent on the feature of using icons along side with blog categories (like slashdot).
Despite the shortcomings of BlogX, I was able to modify BlogX
source code and implemented what I the icon-category feature quite easily. Fed up with the inadequacies
of these free blog hosts, I decided to download the latest version of
BlogX and create a completely revamped blog site on my own website.
When I downloaded BlogX, I was quite surprised to find that BlogX is now under new management by Newtelligence who has done a good job in maintaining the software and the software has now been renamed to dasBlog.
Anyway, I hacked the source code to implement what I want and
completely redesigned my website to come out with what you currently
see the past weekend. There are still bugs and as usual, this project is still a
work-in-progress but I am mighty proud of it. I have managed to transfer my previous blog entries but the timestamp for each blog entry was lost during transfer. So without further ado, may I
present to you Cybersam's blog version 4.0. Suggestions are most welcome.