Well, it's starting to look as if this blog thing isn't working out any more. I am shocked and saddened to see that we're coming up on six months since my last post. Six months! It's not that nothing is going on in my life, or that I haven't given thought to topics I'd like to blog about. In fact, I've thought a bit about reasons why I haven't blogged. Here's what I've been able to come up with:

• Naturally, I've got to start off with the same reason you'll hear from anyone else. <whine>I'm so busy!</whine> Sure, I might be able to claim that I'm a busy person, what with my important job and all. Ha. Plenty of other faculty members maintain active blogs and still get their work done. And it's not that I've lost interest in the medium of blogging; I read more blogs than ever.
• For the past year or two, I've been growing dissatisfied with the editorial policy I established for this site. Specifically, I decided that I wanted to remain anonymous (or at least, that I would not overtly identify myself). Increasingly, I'm finding that this policy interferes with my ability to talk about interesting topics that would reveal my identity.
• This blog is still powered by a set of Python scripts that I wrote, mostly in 2000 but with occasional updates thereafter. Rolling my own was a worthwhile experiment in 2000, but it's a nuisance today. As the medium evolves, it would require ever more effort on my part to stay current. And as little time as I've been devoting to blogging, I've got even less to spend on developing the underlying code, particularly given the many excellent free solutions out there for the taking.

What I'm building up to here is that I think it's time to experiment with a change, to see if it can renew my interest in blogging. This is something I've been contemplating for a while, and I think I've finally built up the motivation to go for it. There are many ways to go about this change; here are my requirements:

• I'd like to host the software installation and all the content. Just as a matter of principle, I prefer not to rely on a third-party site. Having my own blog installation also allows me to make finer-grained changes to look, feel, and behaviour.
• I expect that the new blog will not be anonymous. Theoretically, I lose the ability to speak freely about, say, my job, my bosses, my students, my colleagues, and so on. Of course, that "freedom" is the blogging equivalent of security-through-obscurity (the text of this blog has always been in plain view), and is therefore mostly an illusion.

  Still, it would be nice to make an occasional restricted post. This sort of thing is easy in Livejournal, but that only works because I read enough LJ blogs that it's worth having an account and friending people. I don't want to force readers to keep track of an account on my site. Ian's blog, which uses browser-based authentication, has a similar issue. Also, I like using Google Reader for RSS feeds, and even if I have some form of authentication it's not clear that it can be compatible with Reader (or other aggregators). Does anyone have thoughts on that?

• I absolutely want to support comments. That's one of the most painful absences in my software---the comment threads on the blogs I read are a rich source of information and entertainment. I don't want to go through the effort of implementing comments myself. I don't want to have to deal with comment spam.
• I want better tagging or categorization of entries, so that, for example, I can point people at the complete set of One Minute of Music posts.
• I'd like to have a web-based interface for authoring entries. My software requires me to create a text file and run a script that enters it into the database. The web-based approaches simply seem more lightweight, which means that I might be more likely to post.

Other features (feeds, customizable themes, images, etc.) are important but so common to blog software that I don't need to mention them.

Anyway, right now I've got a mostly-working test installation of Textpattern running on this server. It seems like it has most of the features I want, though I kind of prefer Bloxsom file-based model over the use of mysql in Textpattern and Wordpress. I'm still playing around with the look and feel, but if everything goes smoothly I might announce a changeover at some point.

Or not. As is common in the medium, this might be the last gasp of my nine-year-old blog. To paraphrase the old saying, perhaps we ought to blog as if every entry were our last.

(Oh, and at this point, music fans might be wondering "whither One Minute of Music"? Good question. I do have a few doodles I've been working on, and I enhanced my musical capabilities by buying Propellerhead's new software Record when it came out. I've been stuck, actually---I've got a full-length pop song that cries out for lyrics, but I've never written complete lyrics before. I've also got a few other doodles that could become more OMOMs. I don't think anything will happen on this front in October. Maybe November...)