Welcome to my diary

Hello there, here's my latest re-attempt at keeping a web diary. Hope you like it.

Before, I maintained my old diary (where in a fit of madness, I called it a "Blog") by editing it in a text editor. The templates were written early on and any edits were made by copy-and-paste.

Regular readers (both of you - hello mum) will have realised that this did lead to long quiet periods. It was clear to me that I would have to automate the process. I did consider using some "Blogging" software, but I disliked them. They would usually be a bundle of perl or PHP scripts. From my programmer's perspective, this seems wrong headed. For sure, server side technologies such as CGI and PHP are useful for web based tools or applications, but blogs and diaries are really just static files. I'd much rather generate the HTML once, at home, and put the generated files on the server.

Something I write may end up being linked in Slashdot some day, and while other people's web sites keep churning away repeatedly to generate exactly the same content and being unable to stand the load, I hope that my web site will be shining beacon of reliability. Imagine you had to run a full compile before you run an application, every single time. It's a waste, and when you have 58 million Slashdot readers trying to access your site at the same time, it's time you can't spare.

Anyway, since the only ones I could find which did what I wanted would all cost me money, I wrote my own, "BISHOP". It will go through my base of article texts and generate the front page, perma-links, calendar, article list etc. Pretty funky eh? Well okay, I was never any good at "design" and I know the calendar in the corner doesn't look right. (It's beta!)

In case you are wondering, it stands for "Bill's incredibly stupid home page"! Clever, eh? Well okay, it's a home page generator rather than the home page itself, and it isn't even the home page anymore. But still, once you get hold of a good ackronym like that, you don't give it up in a hurry.

Well, I hope to make this a daily ritual, but we shall see. Come back tomorrow! (Thank you.)