About this blog

Or why WO + XML + XSLT + XHTML + JS + CSS != NIH

Wondering what software is being used for this blog? If the answer is ”No!” then it is probably best to skip this post!

There is a plethora of blogging tools to choose from: hosted-solutions to server installations. A couple of minutes setup on a web-based blogging system and you’re ready to post. Mac OS X Server 10.4 even ships with a Weblog Server ready-to-go, right out-of-the-box. iWeb makes creating blogs a simple drag-and-drop exercise — and the latest version even allows comments to be added. So why did we write yet another blogging system?

Was is some response that that only Magratheans would have truly appreciated — that none of the other blogging tools were entirely satisfactory? Either the interface wasn't quite right in the admin parts of the application, or the installation procedure was half an hour too long, or that the ‘submit’ button was exactly the wrong shade of blue? Or was it sheer arrogance — that none of the other blogging tools could possibly be as good as a hand-written solution? Or maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time?

The answer is that the blog — and the rest of this website — were an opportunity to experiment with some technologies, and also to see just how much could be accomplished in a relatively short space of time with WebObjects.

So, this blog is currently built using a WebObjects application that takes articles stored in the database as XML, transforms them using XSLT into XHTML. These pages are then returned to the browser and displayed due to the magic of CSS and JavaScript. Or pretty much like a large number of other blogging solutions.

And now that the blog is at least semi-functional, I might even try to blog about some of the vaguely interesting parts of the development in future posts.