First Post in Pelican

As the band Rush once wrote: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

This blog started out in 2002 using the MovableType blogging engine. That was probably the best-of-breed at the time, and since I was a Perl hound, it just seemed to work best for me.

Sometime later, however, I got tired of the problems of moving it from one machine to another, and trying to get installed all of the various modules it required, so I moved it to Wordpress. That was great, since I had transitioned to using PHP for most things, and it did not present the module nightmare the MT did.

But now, will all the comment spam, and other crap that comes with running a dynamic site, despite the ease of install and upkeep via Subversion, I’ve tired of having to try to maintain the plugins, clear out the spam, and all the rest that comes with maintaining the site.

For that reason, today marks the transition to the Pelican blogging engine. Written in Python, it creates static pages which can then be hosted almost anywhere, requires no login, etc.

But with that comes a price. Although there are several methods of converting from WP to Pelican, none work perfectly for this site. Over the years I have hosted images in a variety of places, some which no longer exist. Additionally, some were hosted on (and linked via) the old domains under which this blog ran, and thus which are no longer available and appear as broken images.

Slowly, over time, I intend to convert as much of the site as I can, but for now I have included some of the earliest posts. I will fill in the gaps, removing the totally irrelevant posts, and possibly continue to add to this as time goes on.

But for now, here is the new site. Much like the old, only different: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

S

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