Man With Dog

As I consider the development of this blog, I am at somewhat of a crossroads. Which technologies to use: Perl *gasp!*, PHP *gasp!*, node.js *gasp!*, Python *ugh*, or some “snazzy-whazzy” blog framework *barf*.

For each of these technologies, there are as many proponents as there are opponents.

So I’m going to go “first principles”: what do I really need and then how do I get there.

Here are some needs:

• Dynamic web pages: no. My web host has deprecated Perl—okay, that’s their decision—so plan B is to go with static ent pages.

  Static pages will be fine. These I’ll generate on my local machine and then “data cannon” them up to my web server, UltraWebHosting.com

• Comments and user feedback: no. Enabling this capability would require far too much moderation and would open my site to the sewage slough of bots, scammers, etc. that is the current internet.

  The simple solution is that if you have something meaningful to add, email me your comment and I might consider adding to the post.

• Flexibility. Yes. Right now, this blog is stupifyingly simple. But I have much bigger plans and I need most of the features Blosxom provides, especially, categories and what they call flavors.

• “Security”/”performance”/”ease of use” of *blah-this* or *blah-that* or that new technology: No. If I go with purely static pages with some client-side JavaScript sprinkled in, I don’t think I’ll ever need them. Time will tell.

  Sure, security and performance will always be concerns but with static pages, these concerns are greatly mitigated.

• Is any one of current web technologies more secure or more performant or easier to use? I don’t think so. Perl can be made more secure, especially since Perl 5. PHP is not inherently secure and sloppy practices can make is much less so. For my needs, none of them will perform significantly better than the other—my needs are just too small. (Remember in Big-O analysis, when n is small, complexity of the code is more significant.)

  The other thing that concerns my about any new or “emerging” technology is that the hype for them is driven largely by marketers—they just don’t tell you enough to make an informed decision about them. So you end up spending a LOT of time learning the gizmo only to find out later that “oh, we’re still working on that feature” or something like that.

• Cost: definitely no.

• Focus on content: definitely yes. On the web, “content is king.” This was true when the web was new and despite all the glitzy graphics, shading effects, whatever, this is still true today.

  Once I get things set up, I will have succeeded if adding new content is both straightforward and fast. Ideally, the process can be automated.

So here we are.