I was getting lousy performance out of pyblosxom, for reasons that I’m sure have nothing to do with pyblosxom, but with my abuse of it, and my lack of a deep enough understanding of how pingbacks, trackbacks, etc. worked. Also, I didn’t really have the energy to build my own comment-spam filter. Finally, it had served its purpose — it gave me a good feel for what blogging software does. Now I was happy to move on to something with more “GOOBE” (Good Out Of Box Experience), polish, templates, features, etc. I tried blogger again, found it too slow tonight. Looked at Drupal, but its generality scared me. Settled back on WordPress, which I’d played with before and had impressed me. It has an excellent user interface, trivial installation, and seems to have a strong “aftermarket” of plugins and themes. I’m using the Kubrick theme, tweaked with minor CSS changes and a picture that my brother Ivan took on his trip through eastern Europe a few years ago.

So, Will & friends, don’t take it badly — I was a happy customer and then my needs as a customer changed. Thanks for pyblosxom, and keep on trucking.

New features for all you readers: comments are back, the RSS feeds are nicer (e.g. they have dates, which the old one didn’t, which is why all of the old posts that were imported neatly don’t have any history of when they were posted — oh well). I’m sure there’ll be more as I figure this tool out.**