The first blog I put on the web (can’t even remember the URL) used the Perl script blosxom (still available!), which works similar to contemporary static site generators. But then I quickly switched to a pre-release version of Textpattern, which I really, really liked. It had its own markup language (Textile), a good log viewer where I amazedly looked at what search terms people used to get to blog entries, and a very minimal style.
My blog entries? Mostly reacting to more famous (tech-) bloggers plus the occasional lament that my dating life was practically non-existant and that cute girl at the club didn’t notice me…
In the meantime, I’ve had “start blogging” on many a TODO list. I bought some domains for this, looked hard at blogging platforms, played around with them… And did nothing.
I had some attempts with more specific blogging. A German RPG blog. An English one. One for programming topics and longer blog posts that I haven’t abandoned completely. But it’s hard to write here, apparently.
In the last few years, I had this domain attached to a few “minimalistic” blog platforms. First it was Mataroa, then omg.lol. But I’ve been watching pika for a while, and like what they were doing. It’s lightweight, but with a carefully growing feature set. I don’t hate the admin interface, and the editor is okay. It’s WYSIWYG, which is okay for removing yet another impedance between me and the final result. I’m familiar enough with Markdown, but at least this way I’m not tempted to “curate” my posts in yet another editor (which one? let’s bikeshed!), and get things out in one fell swoop. The link editor could use some improvement, but let’s see where the company is going.
So I hope this will be the first of many entries here which might not be about nothing, but where I don’t have any inherent restraints about what and when to blog.