Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Is this thing on?

I'm normally violently opposed to using hosted services for things. When I decided to set up a blog for updates on the million-and-one projects I'm working on, I looked around for a good Perl-based solution for blogging. (Why Perl? I'm good enough with Perl that I feel completely comfortable that there won't be a problem I can't at least understand, if not fix, with Perl-based projects. I can't say the same for other languages.)

After looking around and asking my local Perl Mongers group, I came to the conclusion that blogging is one of those things that Perl works great for, and in fact it is so easy to set up a blog with Perl that the standard suggestion is to just roll your own. There are dozens of ad-hoc blog implementations, but no clear leader that does everything the average user would expect from a blog, maybe because blogging is such a personal thing that rolling your own is appealing. Or maybe because the various solutions that are currently available are just good enough that people consider this a solved problem. Or maybe everybody else gave up and started using hosted services too.

So, since I don't have the time to roll my own right now, and the idea of running the solutions that are out there right now on my own servers scares me a little (small open-source projects don't necessarily have enough eyes on them to make me feel comfortable that they are secure), I'm setting aside my own bias against hosted services to try this thing out for a while.

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