Spent this Sunday morning setting up a blog again. Been years since my last attempt, which included a custom CMS as part of me teaching my self PHP. Needless to say, maintaining and extending the CMS took so much time, I never really did any blogging.

This time I've done it using Drupal and I did not even bother doing my own theme. (Though I hope to rectify that in due time.).

I do quite a bit of Drupal development in my day job, but I've never been asked to set up a pure blog site before, so this was acutally a first. Whent farily quick and easy. But two technical decisions required a bit more thought than the others:

• Using Disqus for comments.
  Replaced the native Drupal comments with Disqus due to their integration with all kinds of social networks. I really appreciate the way authors of comments gets more of an identity this way.
  I could possibly have done this the Drupal way using a number of modules and som custom code, but I decided not to.
• Using GeSHI for syntax highlighting. Supports more languages than I will ever know (no XAML though, but I can use XML highlighting for that).
  Considered using some external service for hosting code samples. But found that It was just too easy to use GeSHI that I decided not to.
  The service I considered using was ForkCan.com, and when it was first released I really liked the way code samples and snippets could take on a life of their own. So I urged the author to make a feature for embedding code from ForkCan into blogs and tutorials, an he did But when I gave it some more thought I came to the conclusion that hosting all code snippets from my blog on such a site would be counter productive for both my blog and for ForkCan

The most difficult part of setting up my blog was the About page. When I visit new blogs this is the first page I look for. I really like getting an idea of the person behind the posts. My presentation of myself will probably get revised a lot of times before I'm 100% satisfied (If I ever get there). But for now, I feel it is a reasonably well written description of the more geeky part of me.

Now, let's hope this doesn't become another one of those dead technical blogs that's never updated....