Since 2002 I’ve been fascinated with the technology that creates a blog. I haven’t been very consistent with actually creating the content that goes with a blog but the backend fascinates me. I think it’s really a resurgence of an interest in programming and the language required to make the system work that fascinates me.
In high school the one computer class that I was allowed (the other classes were for AP students, one of which I was not) was BASIC and I l-o-v-e-d it. One of our projects was to make a game. It consisted mostly of if/then loops and print commands but oh it felt like real magic to tell a computer to do something and have it do it. I loved it and still do. Sporatically, over the course of years after high school I was able to finagle my way into access to a computer. Now that my major work is with computers I have access to them anytime, all the time. Outside of my work time, i’m fascinated with blog/web software technology.
Blosxom was my first. Required a lot of hands on to publish. I liked the control and the interaction; again, my content was less important. I was never a fan of the other premade blogs like livejournal, blogger, etc. Mostly because I was not as interested in putting my content out there as I was in controlling how the content is managed, and how it looks. After Blosxom, was Textpattern which I thought was even more beautiful than Bloxsom and I thought Blosxom was gorgeous! After textpattern was WordPress-which at the time that I was introduced, was less popular than Movable Type but was beginning to do the same things. WordPress was also open source so I didn’t have to sink in any money for essentially something to play with. Every evolution was usually the result of my trying to do something that I couldn’t figure out how to do and reading over and over again how a different software did exactly what I wanted. So I would jump to the next thing which is where I started this short story made long.
I’m on Drupal now. And actually responsible for making it work for someone else’s content. So i’m digging deep and I couldn’t be happier.