MadMode

I'm right there with Joshua when he writes:

I haven't really written anything for this blog in a while.
There are a variety of reasons for this, but I'm generally pretty sensitive to my tools, and I haven't been thrilled with either what I am currently using or what I might use in the future. Do I want to use Wordpress on a virtual machine at some hosting provider? Do I want to write something custom on AppEngine? Or one of a dozen dozen other choices? It makes me want to lie down.

In Feb 2009, I was looking at drupal vs. wordpress and such. I'm writing this in/on google's blogger because:

• I'm tired of the primitive editing support at advogato (especially the way it mangles my paragraphs)
• We can't manage comment spam in our breadcrumbs research group blog.
• I can't manage my own wordpress install (a friendly expert told me that my barn door was open w.r.t. security; fortunately before any unfriendly experts came along)
• Google lets me use my own domain name, for free (wordpress.com charges $10/year). And it encourages me to run ads. I'm still thinking that over.
• Google's data liberation front makes me confident I can get my data back out again.

I'm also using chrome. I mostly got it going for google calendar, which bogs down firefox. App-specific browsers are clearly the way to go... mozilla prism doesn't seem to have a big enough userbase to be polished, where chrome's application tabs show that it takes this idea seriously.
Oh... and years after buying this dual-core amd64 machine, I finally installed 64bit ubuntu. More on that in another episode of madmode...