After a good run, I've decided to retire YAWT for the time being. I found the workflow I set up to be a bit complicated, and I found myself wanting to concentrate more on writing rather than the nitty-gritty of publishing. I also got a bit tired of the lone wolf thing and I wanted to try using piece of software that other people actually use.
I started this blog 4 years ago, got a few entries in, and then promptly shut the whole thing down when it got overrun with spam. I have now resurrected it, using a new version of YAWT written in python which, for lack of a better name, I shall call YAWT 2.0.
When I started this blog, I didn't expect very much in the way of comments or trackbacks. I also didn't expect any spam, which means I didn't take any precautions. I mean, how would anybody even know about this blog?
Silly, silly me.
So, I have turned off comments and trackbacks until I figure out a reasonably reliable way of separating the spam from the ham. This will probably entail a bit of a rewrite of YAWT as I figure out a way to do this in a clean and modular manner. Why make it easy on myself when I can make it hard?
So I got myself a new weblog, hosted on Netfirms. I'm not particularly enjoying the Netfirms experience, but it was only $10 for a year and I get SSH access. They're quite skimpy with the perl modules, forcing me to install a bunch of stuff in my home directory.
I'm using a homemade blogging program because I got tired of blosxom's ugliness and I didn't really like what I saw of Bryar. I'm calling it YAWT in my head - short for Yet Another Weblog Tool. I'm hoping to extend it at some point to handle photo galleries in a seamless and efficient manner - my last attempt to write an online photo manager was quite slow. We'll see.