Fri 30 May 2008 16:35
Blogging: Keeping It Simple
When I decided it was time to start blogging about information technology
and information communication issues, I needed to choose some suitable blog
software, something that would provide good results but also be easy to use.
Open source is
preferable. So I decided to do a quick web search and see what I could
find. Most blog software seems to be pretty heavyweight: a database on the
back-end to hold the blog entries, plus some sort of complex PHP web front
end to display them. But this makes no sense to me: why use a database
for blog entries? Blog entries are simple bits of text data that are
organized in simple ways. There's no need for powerful query languages,
transactional locking, and the various good things databases provide.
These things are not free: databases have overhead to set up and run -
I'm not worried so much about the computational resource overhead, but
rather the human overhead: the time and energy required to configure,
maintain, and back up databases. Do we really need such a thing for a blog?
Happily, I found blosxom, a piece of open-source blogging software that consists of a simple Perl CGI that uses a simple filesystem backend (a directory hierarchy) to hold all the blog entries. This is a nicely designed piece of software: simple, straightforward, low overhead, and very quick and easy to get going. It's also quite customizable. Clever simplifying details abound: for example, the date of the blog entry is simply the timestamp of the file, you create a new blog entry by simply creating a new file of the right name wherever you wish in the blog directory hierarchy, and writing something into it with your favourite text editor. You can organize your blog entries by topic if you want, and blosxom gets it all right. RSS seems all the rage these days: blosxom does that too: just add /index.rss to the end of the URL. For me, the only annoying bit of this software so far is the spelling of its name: I keep typing "bloxsom" for some reason.
Why is blosxom so good? Because it leverages what is already present on most systems: the filesystem, rather than introduce a complex, powerful and costly tool (a relational database) when it's not really needed. Kudos to Rael Dornfest, who, instead of taking the most popular or obvious approach, took the time to understand the problem being solved and the tools already available to solve it. This is an example of sensible economizing: human time and effort is a valuable commodity, the use of powerful tools (e.g. relational databases) uses up some of that commodity, and so such tools should be avoided unless they are really needed. If you think this sounds a little like "green" or "environmental" thinking, you're quite right: conserving energy to preserve the environment is very similar to conserving human energy to preserve the human environment. Just as the natural environment suffers strains from excessive energy consumption, so the human environment suffers from excessive demands on each person's time and energy. In both realms, economical thinking at design time is a prerequisite to good technology.