Blog Software Experimentation

I’ve been playing with a bunch of other blog software, including Pebble, Roller, and the port of DasBlog to Mono. Pebble isn’t quite what I’m looking for. DasBlog is quite good, but the XSP runtime uses about half of Samus’ meager 96MB of RAM. Also, I am worried about the stability and lifetime of the code, since the port to mono has not been accepted as a patch to the source tree. And the worst problem is that DasBlog’s file format is a bit obtuse. I would need to import all of my old blog entries, currently stored in a MySQL database, but the storage mechanism used is not readily apparant from a half hour or so of inspection.

I am really impressed with Roller. It supports all the latest blogosphere gadgetry, it produces super-standard HTML/CSS pages, and it’s storage format in MySQL with an easy-to-understand table structure. I already have about 2/3 a perl script hacked up to do the conversion, despite the major “but” coming up in the next sentence. But the biggest problem is that Roller eats pretty much ALL of Samus’ memory. My poor little box thrashes like a crocodile in a death roll, and I just can’t have that. I think I’m gonna be using Geeklog until I get a server that wasn’t built circa 1996.