A few things have collided to inspire me to fix up my blog. These are:
1. Susan printed out all of the blog entries from our trip around Australia & New Zealand and had them bound into a book, as a present for my 30th birthday!
2. She later told me that she saw lots of references to pr0n, gambling etc on the blog and was wondering if I knew about it. I told her that was impossible, and that the machine she was using must have been trojan'd or something.
3. I accidentally added a mate from Australia (Tim Gould) to a Skype chat session with my sister. He got back to me this morning and when I inquired about his upcoming trip to Europe, he pointed me at his
website. From there, I found my way to
his blog.
The first two things from above inspired me to dig up my blog and take a look at it for the first time in about six months. Indeed, it was liberally coated with references to all kinds of spam, and additionally was reporting many errors from broken MySQL tables. I eventually fixed it up, but it was a painful experience and prompted me to re-evaluate my choice of 'Blog:CMS' as a blogging tool. When I originally chose it, I had limited time as I was setting it up on my second last day of work at the RTA in Australia. As a result, I didn't have a huge amount of time to evaluate the various blogging alternatives.
When I was setting it up, I had many problems with it, and had to manually edit and hack alot of stuff to get it to work, and also had to pull out or comment out various blocks of functionality I didn't need or want. Yesterday I discovered the reason for all of this! Blog:CMS basically consists of a number of open source projects badly hacked together by some loser called Radek Hulán. The blog component is based on 'Nucleus' (http://www.nucleuscms.org/). I spent some time comparing 'Nucleus' with 'Blog:CMS' and decided that I would change to Nucleus as it seemed to be better supported and didn't include the kitchen sink.
I did some web-searching for a conversion tool, and found lots of posts by Radek blowing his trumpet (for
example), and was generally repulsed by his comments and behaviour. He seems to think that size is everything and continuously comments how much bigger his fork of Nucleus is - my theory is that he is compensating for deficiencies in another department.
At any rate, no decent conversion tools turned up, so I manually did the changeover from Blog:CMS to Nucleus. It was reasonably pain free, just involving some hacking out of the blog_cmsnucleus tables into the nucleus ones, the only complicated bits being that I had to delete some columns first.
This done, my blog then ran on Nucleus! Hurray! It was a much cleaner design than Blog:CMS and I went to bed, happy.
However, this morning, after my conversation with Tim, I noted that his blog was based on Serendipity, so I was inspired to try that out and see how it had matured since my last look at it. I was very impressed and it seemed alot cleaner and more user friendly than either Nucleus or Blog:CMS so I decided to switch to it. After setting up, I just clicked 'Import data', and it imported all of my old blog entries from Nucleus in seconds, and I was setup!
The spam I had seen in Blog:CMS came from a combination of Comments and Trackbacks, so I was heartened to see Tim's comments
here about how Serendipity handles this, and hopefully this won't happen again.
Hurray!
