So, yet again, I’m switching to a new blogging engine. I know, this is the third time I’ve done this, I’m annoyed with me too.
I liked FLog, I really did, but it had some problems and limitations that just got to be too much after a while. Not the least of which being that the person who wrote it hasn’t updated it for some time, the site not showing any life for over a year now. As technologies change, and security issues and other problems are uncovered, it’s essential that software be updated to keep up. It’s become apparent that FLog is not going to be updated nearly regularly enough to suit my needs, if at all, so yet again I’m forced to move on.
As a final insult, some bastard hacked into my FLog account and locked me out of it. He could have trashed the whole thing, for that I suppose I’m grateful, but locking me out of the Admin page rendered me unable to post or make changes of any kind. Coincidentally I’m having some trouble with my web host right now, so I can’t even FTP in and try to fix things that way. What good is a blog I can’t post to?
As a matter of purest coincidence, at approximately the time I’d made this determination, the long awaited “RapidBlog” plugin for RapidWeaver (an easy to use but deceptively powerful web site creation tool for the Mac) was released, enabling remote blog posting. It’s the best of both worlds, I can use my web site tool of choice, and post to it from anywhere that I can get online (without having to hack a blogging script into it, as I’ve done before with CuteNews with unacceptable results).
A reasonable question would be why I don’t simply go back to WordPress. WordPress is, after all, powerful and relatively easy to use, which is not to mention the scores of useful and nifty plugins available for it. That’s all true, and I rather enjoy WordPress, but there are certain things I don’t like about it. The most obvious example is that it is database driven. I can practically hear some of you tearing your hair out, shouting “that’s a good thing, you moron!” at the screen. Sure it is, but it adds a level of complexity that I’m simply not comfortable with, and i’ve used enough “flat file” driven scripts to know that it’s possible to get similar, if not equal, levels of performance and functionality out of them. I want to be able to play around with my sites, back them up with ease, and be able to move them around without worrying about database issues, and possible performance losses are acceptable to me in the face of all that. I could take the time to learn about databases, to become comfortable with MySQL, but I simply don’t have the time or the drive to do so.
The lack of a database was one of the things that first attracted me to FLog, as it had attracted me to CuteNews before that. This solution is database driven, but in a different way. RapidBlog’s back end is supplied by Blogger, but the whole thing is synced up with the site file on my computer. In other words, I deal only with a file on my computer, and Blogger deals with the database portion for me. I like it. The only way I see this not working out is if Blogger goes under, or starts doing bad things with my posts.
Here’s hoping.
