Believe it or not, this blog with very few entries has a history, which I will start to narrate in this post.

• Blogger (August 2002). During Summer 2002, I went with my brother and sister to Orlando for a vacation. To keep our parents updated on out doings, I set up a blog at blogger (before it was owned by Google). It turned out that the only internet connection that we could use during our stay was in a very limited computer at the hotel lobby (we didn’t take a laptop since it was a vacation after all). This computer had some trouble with Blogger’s javascript so we couldn’t post, and had to rely on email for our communication. So much for a live journal of all the fun!
• Movable Type (February 2003). When I started exploring blogging software in 2003 this was the most popular package, so I installed it on my Mac (Mac OS X 10.2) and created my first blog. MT generated static pages with all my posts, archives and such, and since my primary host back then was .Mac, I couldn’t install it there, so I just synchronized my local copy with .Mac using sitecopy. Posting was really time consuming, and things like comments and trackbacks were obviously not supported in a static environment. To get around the commenting issue, I programmed a comment interface based on my PerlDatabase. I didn’t receive many comments, but my Perl skills were certainly enhanced.
• Pebble 1.6b (May 2004). After buying the gbtopia.com domain and setting up a website with my current host (Lunarpages), I selected Pebble as my blogging software. I looked for a host with at least a Web Container since Java is my language of choice. Pebble was the only J2EE based blogger that didn’t use libraries such as Velocity that aren’t supported by my host. It turned out to be fine although some hacks were necessary to achieve the look that I wanted. I also had to rewrite the whole template since back then it used tables for layout and HTML 4, and I was switching to a cleaner CSS and XHTML based site. At first I didn’t like the static XML repository instead of a database, but since it was pretty fast, I didn’t mind much, and the backups were a breeze.

to be continued…

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