This site runs on Pyblosxom, a weird but inter­est­ing weblog sys­tem writ­ten in Python. Pyblosxom has the dual ben­e­fits of being very light­weight and extremely cus­tomiz­able. Instead of using a SQL data­base, it stores entries and com­ments in a filesys­tem tree, which is very con­ve­nient for peo­ple who pre­fer a com­mand line to a Web inter­face (me). When I selected it in early 2008, it was still being actively devel­oped. It also gave me a good excuse to learn Python, which I have done with mod­est success.

Per­for­mance and reli­a­bil­ity prob­lems with my cur­rent server have led me to want to move this site to a faster vir­tual server “in the cloud.” Nat­u­rally, I would install the lat­est ver­sion of Pyblosxom on said machine, right? Well… For a few months I’ve been test­ing pyblosxom 1.5rc2, the fruit of two years of spo­radic devel­op­ment by the 3 other peo­ple who actu­ally use this soft­ware. Because some back-end redesign neces­si­tated many changes to my Scot­tos­phere mod­i­fi­ca­tions, it took a while to get it con­fig­ured again. And indeed, my non-public stag­ing server is now about 100 times faster than the cur­rent site. But, to my great frus­tra­tion, I still can’t get com­ments to work prop­erly with Ajax. It has become a huge waste of time to debug, and I’m ready to throw in the towel. I really don’t want to start over, but I won­der: should I just give up and switch to Wordpress?