Well... happy new year everyone!
After some thought, I\'ve decided to make my thoughts page (aka blog) a dynamic, database-driven one... and possibly, as time goes on, the rest of the site as well. of course, there are both pros and cons to this:
PROS:
* Easier to post -- I don\'t like using FTP clients, so when I write a thought, I log into my host via ssh and edit HTML directly (and modifying index pages as well to reflect the new \"modified by\" dates). While a simple task, as most of you know, I\'m pretty lazy, and so without this extra layer of overhead, I should be able to post more comments, fresh as they come up in my mind. Furthermore, this lets me update from Internet cafes or other public terminals that may not have ssh.
* Comments -- I had refrained from making a comment system for my blog, because I thought people would use the jack.html responses forum of JBB, but apparently, that\'s been effectively dead as of late. It\'s a full threaded comment system, a la Slashdot or most other \"discussion\" sites, unlike simpler solutions on most people\'s blogs. So, yeah, feel free to comment.
* Dynamic -- it\'s searchable in terms of topic area and full text, and customizable according to one\'s preferences, so if you don\'t like to view comments on a certain topic, you can simply exclude them.
* Unified -- it allows me to post updates to not only the thoughts, but pictures, quotes, etc. on a single portal page. And long thoughts and short thoughts alike will be able to share a single page.
Cons:
* It\'s hard to post the real \"short\" 1-2 line short thoughts that seem to pop up every now and then in people\'s pages, since each new post is considered a \"story\" by itself, and frequent such short posts would take up a lot of room... but then, I\'ve realized that I\'ve never really posted the \"quickie\" type of thoughts that these short ones generally are, so perhaps this isn\'t too bad for my case. I always like to go for quality rather than quantity.
* Harder to back up... let\'s hope this web host of mine isn\'t too flaky, and I\'m conscientious enough to dump the MySQL database every now and then.
Anyhow, let\'s see how this goes... this will most likely undergo a significant amount of tweaking, and expansion as I convert all my old thoughts into the database, and also make the pictures, etc. dynamic as well -- so comments, comments, comments people! =)
So why did I decide on GeekLog? I just want a web log with the ability to comment, basically, with some future extendibility for pictures, etc. I don\'t need a whole web portal/revision/content management system like PostNuke, or Slash (the latter which needs root access to install anyhow, so it wasn\'t an option for me, since my hosting is a shared server.)
Of course, it goes without saying that it must be open source, so I can make the tweaks necessary to integrate with the rest of the site.
Anyhow, I like Geeklog thus far in the 2-3 hours I\'ve used it, and I can already highly recommend it for its purpose.