Ode to a new blog

My old blog recently died. It was a long, drawn-out and breathless death... not a pretty thing to witness for someone so intimately involved with it. It was a Moveable Type blog... and the folks at MT decided that it would be wise to use Perl's DB_FILE module. What this means is that if your system administrator upgrades Perl, you'll have to upgrade your blog's databases quickly.

In my case, and the case of others at SIMS, the result was a Berkeley DB corruption (MT users, export you blog's databases, right now... store in a safe place). So, my options were to start a new blog (you are here now), or to erase the old one or move it breaking all "permalinks". I decided to start a new blog... my blog is mostly for myself and for other bloggers I know.

I also made the important decision to move from a proprietary blogging tool with quite restrictive licensing terms to b2evolution, which, as you can see and as I can attest to, kicks serious ass. b2evo (for short) is all php and MySQL... which makes it scream. As well, the developers of b2evo license under the GPL (yay!) and seem to incorporate a lot of things that are luxuries of sorts in open source development, as a friend put it recently:

Seems too good to be true. It's hard to believe this guy is real, I mean, programming with the Rational Unified Process? Using real use cases, developing a wiki for collaborative documentation. It's like this guy actually cares about the software that he writes and wants it to grow.

Here's to new horizons. (Note: hopefully I'll be able to take this from dream.sims.berkeley.edu/~jhall/nqb2/ to simply pobox.com/~jhall/nqb2)