encoded notions

I’ve completed a journey that began in July 2003.

I’ve walked down the path of weblogging. I began with Blosxom, and tried to hack it to act a bit like slashcode with regards to categorization and user maintenance.

That program evolved past Blosxom and eventually there was nothing of the original source left, but in it’s stead stood Orchid; written in Perl, it had a templating system, multi-user access with permissions, and plugins for the different page types. It could do blogs, galleries, linkblogs, single pages, directories, address books, a library system, a quote database, a feed syndicator etc.

I also purchased my own domain name at nexusvector.net and started renting space from noir.cc. All was well with the world, and I used the software for my site as well as for the site for the special dorm floor on (The House of General Science).

As I learned to absorb information not only from slashdot, but also from a vast array of blogs and other sites that output an RSS feed. Special sites, such as Erik Benson’s weblog, seemed to stick out in my mind because they felt more like a wiki than a blog. As a hacker & a geek at heart (but a physicist by choice) I felt an itch to write my own wiki software—just to see if I could do it.

Sometime between February and April of 2004 I wrote this beast in Perl, using what I learned from Orchid. The one difference between my wiki software and other systems is that pages would be protected from non-owner edits by default unless the author opened it up to registered users. Non-registered users could not edit anything. I drew up a small logo for it and christened it Infusion. I added some users and let it go.

Then something bad happened. My hosting provider’s hosting provider suspended my account because Orchid had sprialed off into an infinite loop and consumed ~97% of the shared server’s CPU. I was depressed that an error like that could go undetected for so long, but unfortunately I could not locate the error since there was no error output for such an event as that (especially since I did not wish to recreate the glitch and lose my account again). I lost faith in my software and decided to port all of my blog entries over into my wiki.

After I did that, something didn’t feel right, from a deep inner-geek level. Thoughts of namespace conflicts for titles floated through my mind and I let it slide. At some point I decided to learn PHP and perhaps write a simple blogging-only tool to settle my namespace issues. About a week into translating large portions of Orchid into PHP, I stumbled across WordPress.

WordPress is a PHP-based blogging tool that does not do statically built pages like MovableType. It felt more right to me than MT. Inside of me, I finally let go and gave in…

I realized that I didn’t want to write a blogging application, but I only wanted to understand it. At this point in my journey I did understand it, and so my geek was satisfied with using WordPress.

Redirects, rewrites, templates, and a manual import later: I have completed the move.

This is the post that I christen the install with. Oddly enough, Shelley Powers has just switched from MT to WP.