The Starrenburg’s Website

When I was looking at setting up a Weblog the three main packages I heard about were Blogger, Movable Type and WordPress.

The first package I tried was MovableType, it is OK but seemed a little limited. Also, of course, it is not OpenSource/Freeware so if I was going to use it for the whole family there would be costs involved.

Then I had a look at WordPress, and tried the demo at OpensourceCMS. It seemed to have a better range of options and by requiring that the datasource be a MySQL database (instead of allowing the use of a Berkley DB file based database) meant that permissions with Apache were simpler and kept secure. No need for cgiwrapper or suexec and fiddling with permissions on directories (yes I know MT can use databases as well).

So what the heck - I didn’t have a lot of Movable Type posts so I just deleted the MT installation, downloaded the WordPress archive file, and within minutes after answering a few questions I had the weblog up and running.

Now that it is installed and I have been using WordPress for a while it also feels, if you understand what I mean, more comfortable. Like a pair of favourite shoes, everything just fits.

And… it’s OpenSource.

Took me all of 10 minutes to get WordPress downloaded, copied to the server, MySQL DB created, config file changed, setup script run and first blog posted.

Took longer to find a template and figure out how to apply it!!

Nice.