Tag: blogging

FPAleksandr

FPAleksandr is a theme for FlatPress that I am porting from Mat Wiseman’s insanely awesome Aleksandr, originally made for Textpattern.

It’s available in my Bitbucket, and there’s also a FlatPress forum discussion.

I tried to remain as faithful as possible to the original, but some things were just not going to translate directly—the footers, for instance. The best solution I was able to arrive at for the footers takes away some of the elegance of the original, but given the limits of the platform I don’t think it’s all that bad.

There are still some bugs to squash and lipstick to be applied, but it’s basically usable as-is.

Are there any good blogging engines?

I’ve spent the last few days evaluating various self-hosted blogging engines from three different points of view: as an author, a designer, and a developer/maintainer. And I haven’t been able to find anything that doesn’t have a significant issue in at least one of those areas.

Of course, you might be wondering why I’m bothering at all. Why not just host your blog(s) at Blogger or WordPress.com or Tumblr or Posterous? The main reason is that I think it’s a good idea to own your data, and self-hosted anything is one way to do that.

The next question is why I just don’t stick with WordPress and call it a day? It turns out that the popularity of this platform makes it a target for hackers and other miscreants. It’s the Windows malware problem all over again. Vulnerability through lack of obscurity.

One option is to install WP and then lock it down as much as possible. And that may very well be what I end up doing, because I’m at a loss for anything that sucks less.