Tom Insam

Running your own blog

in Blogs and baked goods John August simultaneously uses a new and incompatible baking metaphor about blogging, and argues that..

Most people shouldn’t be running their own blogging software

I agree. Except that I do run my own. In fact, not only do I host my own blogging software, on a machine that I admin myself, but I wrote the whole thing too. Every time I want a feature, I can't just look for a plugin, I have to crack open a text editor. I'm crazy!

I've pondered changing this a few times, and indeed, I've re-written the software a lot in the past, and ported it around various different off-the-shelf systems, and nearly just canned the whole thing and moved to Tumblr on a couple of particularly bad days in the past, but I don't. And I think it's worth explicitly writing down the reason.

I don't really care about the bread. I make ovens and baking trays. The bread (recent inexplicable blogging frenzy notwithstanding) is just a demo of the software. Look! I can syndicate a Flickr photoset and my twittering and Dopplr-driven maps and integrate them into a single page for the trip then tie them into an article about something, then provide a link to put all the photos on a map! The words aren't the important bit.

So that's why I bake. Except that I fry. Whatever.