This is my fourth attempt at setting up a web log. My first blog was set up in early 2005 and can be seen at http://www.buildblog.oldhuntinglodge.com/. It recorded the day-to-day progress of a renovation project at our home. The code was written in ASP (as opposed to ASP.NET) and had several bugs which I laboriously fixed. I exchanged a few emails with the author whom I seem to remember was a student; he was very helpful but the end result just didn’t have a professional gloss.
Then I spent rather too long tinkering with an ASP.NET 2.0 web project published in ASP.NET PRO magazine (April, May, June 2006 editions). The blog was fairly simple and stored its posts in a SQL Server database. It worked fine but didn’t have all the features I wanted.
During summer 2006 I discovered dasBlog. This had a neat user interface, was free to download and use, and was a breeze to set up. I downloaded the zipfile and extracted its contents to my PC, then used an FTP tool to transfer all the files to my hosted web server. I amended a couple of configuration files and hey presto it appeared to work! Of course as soon as I tried to save something it gave an error, but the error text described exactly the changes I needed to make to permissions on certain directories on the web server. Having made these changes it appeared to work just fine but over the coming weeks I became infuriated with some horrible bugs. It couldn’t cope with the fact that my hosted web server was in a timezone 8 hours behind my own timezone, and when I added new posts they mysteriously disappeared until the following day. I stuck with it for over a month but finally gave up.
WordPress was recommended in an article in PC Pro magazine. Unlike my other blogs it isn’t based around Microsoft’s ASP or ASP.NET technology, instead using PHP and MySQL, neither of which I’d used before. Nevertheless it was free to download and simple to setup. Time will tell whether it behaves any better than the others. What I will say is that I’m delighted with the high-quality and ample documentation, which makes a pleasant change from the other blogs.