It has taken me a while to get here. What you see may look like just another blog, but the road to MaluriView has been a long one. This was mostly due to my attempts to mix building a blog with learning some new technologies and languages. Here’s how it went:
Django
I started with Django, an MVC (or should I say MTV) web development framework written in Python. With Python being a fairly hot language right now, I thought I could get to know it a little whilst also building a blog. It also has an “out-of-the-box” admin area so that you can perform CRUD operations on your models, which I thought would fit in pretty well with what I wanted to build. Although I found development quite comfortable, I felt I was trying to learn too many new things and wasn’t moving ahead fast enough. So Django was dropped and something more familiar picked up…
Catalyst
Perl. I’ve worked with it for several years now in my day job and although it has a bad reputation and is generally a bit quirky, if used responsibly can be very useful and powerful. Probably the hottest thing in the Perl world at the moment is Catalyst, a very elegant MVC framework. Since I know the language well, I expected the only learning curve would be the framework itself. I worked over the tutorial, and yes, it is a very nice framework which I really enjoyed working with, but I ran into a couple of problems.
Installing the latest version of the module (which uses Moose) was not trivial, and generally getting all the dependencies installed on my local machine was quite troublesome. I got there with some help from dh-make-perl, but it was quite a painful experience. When it came to installation on my Dreamhost account, I found the task even trickier (I didn’t manage to successfully install it there actually). All this got me thinking about keeping my dev. and production environments in sync with each other, about using local::lib + SVN, then it struck me that this level of organisation shouldn’t be necessary for a simple personal blog. Catalyst is definitely a great choice for a larger scale project, but I was wasting my time thinking about things that were just not relevant for what I really wanted to build. Catalyst was shelved for another day.
ModX
This CMS was recommended to me some time ago. Compared to a few others I’ve worked with, modX is nice and straight-forward and easy to set up. I got a release from the Evolution line installed locally and started to go about setting things up. The first thing I looked for was a plugin/extension for blogging, but instead found this article, which basically said modX is great for “websites” but if you are setting up a blog why not just use…
Wordpress
For years I’ve associated Wordpress with blogging, yet I never bothered to actually take a look at the project closely. Their homepage gave me the impression that they were a hosted solution, but I soon found the .org site where you can download their code for use on your own server. But before I downloaded anything I thought I’d check Dreamhost’s one-click installation section, and there it was top of the list. So fifteen minutes after considering using Wordpress, I had it installed any ready to configure on my hosting! Brilliant service from Dreamhost. And before long MaluriView was shaping up and quickly becoming a reality.
Many solutions were experimented with on the road to this blog, but ultimately the best-fit, fully featured product finished triumphant. This was mostly due to it having all the required functionality right there ready to use. Mixing in too many other experiments can easily leave you sidetracked, so best to find a solution that fits your project and focus on doing (and finishing) only what you set out to do.