And so it begins.

» Het bloed kruipt waar het niet gaan kan.

So... yeah.

My hiatus from blogging was never meant to permanent. Since February, I've been thinking about what my new site was going to be like.

I was getting a bit tired of client-side blogging tools, with their obvious drawbacks. So I grabbed a Rails book and wrote a small proof-of-concept CMS, called "Nodes". Actually, it's more like a personal wiki, with some nice (and maybe dangerous) twists. Maybe more about this later.

I also wrote something else. Remember this post? I actually did write something that is, well, different. Maybe a bit too much so. It's more of a type of rendering (like Textile) than a blogging tool per se, although it can be used as such. The working title of this program is "Absinthe", which should tell you enough. ;-)

I am not using either of them for this weblog.

Problem is, we moved a few months ago. Our new phone company promised us that DSL would be available at our new location, which turned out not to be the case after all. So now we're stuck with either dialup or a satellite connection provided by HughesNet. Both are slow and unreliable (the satellite more so than dialup, by the way; more about this in a separate post). Both make it hard for me to use the internet like I did before. I don't fancy typing a long post in a browser, and then seeing the dreaded "Suspected satellite outage" message when I want to save it. Nor is my new connection suitable for uploading large files.

So I grudgingly decided to go with something very minimalistic. I quickly wrote some simple blogging software. It's client-based, again, and it's a bit like Firedrop, although it's much smaller and doesn't have a GUI. Both software and website are devoid of bells and whistles. This allows me to keep it all lean and mean, which is a necessity in my new situation.

(The new software is called IV, as in the Roman numeral 4. I am not going to make it available. If you're looking for a blogging tool, take a look at Firedrop instead.)

I did away with a number of things. There is no sidebar. There's only one feed, in Atom (sorry, no RSS). There are no comments; I didn't want to mess with Haloscan and the like. If you have something important or interesting to say, mail me; there's a contact link at the bottom of every page. There are no categories (but I do use tags).

Also, each post has its own separate page. The front page does not contain the last N posts; rather, it contains links to them, plus a number of other things that might be of interest.