blogging

I’m trying to get into this whole blogging thing. I’ve posted a lot of my previous writing through a rather laborious manual process because none of the blog packages I’ve looked at have really caught my fancy… They’re either too complex, or not sophisticated enough. I’ve been watching Rael Dornfest’s blosxom for quite some time – intrigued by its simplicity – but finally decided that it didn’t fit the bill for me either (although I haven’t fully ruled out blagg for aggregation).

I want something that:

• allows me to reuse the same post title again and again if I want to (blosxom, using discrete files for blog entires, fails this requirement)
• allows easy participation from readers
• is relatively easy to administer, control and maintain

I finally gave up on "typical" blog packages and installed phpBB2. The forum metaphor extends easily enough into a blog (only one person is authorized to create new topics, and everyone can comment); and the "Fetch All" mod allows me to extract my blog posts for publication to my main index page. The bonus is that I can support a much greater depth of participation from readers in the other forum topics, or possibly even offer friends their own blog topic. (This assumes of course that people will be interested in participating in discussions here)

Now that I have the blog set up, I think it would be nice to have some more modern blog features like content syndication, aggregation, pingback / trackback, etc. This is where my choice of software presents a barrier, since phpBB wasn’t developed to support things like remote content aggregation, remote commenting, etc. Some folks have taken baby steps in various directions (here, here, here, here), but it looks like there’s quite a ways to go.