How I get this blog together

I might as well describe the steps I went through to get this blog into existence:

Choosing a blog host

I had the choice between hosting the blog itself or using a blog hosting service. If I hosted my own blog, then I could control the information that would be published. In other words, I would be able to censor this that I had already published. Well, the information I want to blog will be technical recipes, and won't be Xelerance intellectual property. Since I am making this information public anyways, there is no specific requirements for me to host my own blog. I settled on Blogger because I just wanted to get up and running fast.

Choosing a blog software

Bart proposed vimblog; that one is very tech-oriented, and the fun thing about it is that all blog entries are stored in "email format" on the server. Well, I decided on Blogger as a host, so since vimblog is mostly a server-side software, I decided to pass. I had to chose between software that would be able to speak MoveableType API to Blogger. I settled settled on Ecto because I have a Mac and Ecto offers a queuing system. With Ecto, I can create drafts of future blog entries I want to create for the future. Quite neat.

Publishing

Ecto sends automatically to Blogger when I connect to the Internet. I can also synch published stories between my workstation and my laptop. I cannot synch draft stories between my workstation and my laptop, but I will try to find or code a way. This might be hard, since Ecto seems to store drafts in a .plist file. Perhaps if I can find a way to synch parts of an XML tree, this might work.

Here we go

It's been 3 years since my last confession ....

Well, what are blogs supposed to be but a public confession of our actions ? Hopefully this won't be that kind of blog. I decided to get a blogger account and start typing for the general public because I've found myself asking Bart to blog a technical item or technique that I had created that day.

You see, that's where I think that blogging is becoming the norm. We are moving our great Internet archive method from Usenet to web logs. So, searching for techniques and information used to give us a link to a newsgroup, and now chances are you will be linked to an individual's blog instead. By creating this blog, I hope to archive some of the technical recipes that I've had to create as part of my job.

Of course, I might ramble somewhat about the "Chief Executive" part of the job as well.

As most bloggers seem to write to an audience, my blog may very well be lines of code and a few notes. If I bring in an audience, I will be the first surprised.