The Journey Is the Destination

The Scoop on How I Am Trying to Get My Blog on Here

Welcome to my home page! Here is a photo of my home, which is where I host this site and a few others. Click on the photo to see a bigger image.

My Home - with Jamie, the Grey Gleam Juniper (l), and Pat, the Purple Ash Tree (r)

The summer of 2007 marks my emancipation from the lawn mower. The entire yard, front and back, is all rocks now, baby! I actually gave the lawn mower away to a neighbor!!

A batch of photos over at artsyvisions.com entitled Two Tons o' Pea Gravel - Before and After (August, 2007) documents the culmination of this process.

The Plan

Regarding the site, though, the plan was — and still is — to have a blog here. Actually, not so long ago, I had one going using PHP Nuke's Journal module at groja.com, but I just didn't like the feel of that module. Moreover though, I am not interested in promoting that site right now, so it doesn't make sense to ask people to visit it.

Over the summer I spent a few months learning about Ruby on Rails (RoR). I bought a couple of books and got the hang of it — it's pretty cool, very powerful technology!

But then I had difficulty getting it to work with apache, and after some research learned I wasn't the only one. And after thinking about it a bit, I decided that even if I could get it to work, I didn't want to.

For one thing, it would have to run as a fast cgi application, and despite the fact they call it "fast," what I was reading made it sound like it would still be a bit slow. And moreover, although fun to play around with, at version 1.2.5 I decided that RoR is just too new, too bleeding edge.

The Search

Searching in portage for blogging packages supported by gentoo, it became apparent there was only one package that wasn't masked, coreblog, which runs under zope. These are python-based tools, so I had some fun looking into all that. But after playing around with zope for a bit, I decided against it.

For one thing, like RoR it would have to run as a fast cgi app. And for another — unlike RoR — it's a bit too mature. When it came time to try to get coreblog to run — to actually load the python code into zope — I got some syntax errors. Researching the errors I found nothing about them and all in all very little out on the 'net about coreblog. Hmmm, one would think that if others were using it, there would be something somewhere about these errors.

After some more searching, it became apparent that most people are using coreblog2, which runs on plone. However, coreblog2 is masked in portage. So the thought then occurred, if I am going to unmask a blogging package, it might as well be one of those based on PHP and MySql. Because after all, I am running a Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP (LAMP) server, so it's already set up for that.

Current Thinking

So now I am thinking about trying joomla! But first, after all that "work" with nothing to show for my efforts — as "fun" as they were — I thought I'd put the quest for blogging software on hold while I put this essentially static site together.

And in end, I wound up spending more time organizing photos on artsyvisions.com than on putting this site together. So you should check that out, for sure.

The Journey

A few years back, while visiting family back in Virginia, my father bought me a Chesapeake Bay t-shirt at the Urbanna Oyster Festival. It caught my eye, because on the back it says:

"The Journey is the Destination."

I'm not sure how that applies to the Chesapeake Bay, but it certainly sums up the process of trying to get my blog on here! But there's absolutely no need to rush, particularly since I already have blogs at myspace and last.fm.

Yes, the journey — learning about the different packages out there —is turning out to be more interesting than having yet another blog. In other words, it will be ready when it will be ready!

So what are you waiting for, go check out my photos at artsyvisions.com already!