I’ve finally got this site looking and acting the way I want it to; after several weeks battling a homepage, I decided to base the site on blogging software, having realised that maintenance was going to be an enormous pain if I wanted to keep various site elements visually in sync. The software I’m using is bBlog, a PHP-based, open source platform which is sadly no longer in active development. Having looked at Wordpress, Movable Type and a whole bunch of others, I found that they were simply too top-heavy for my needs. I’m not usually a proponent of the minimalist approach, but in this case I don’t want to administer a load of plug-ins, additions and services that I’m not going to use. What swayed me in bBlog’s favour, despite the paucity of extras, was complexity, cost and a long-standing weakness for the open-source movement. If my requirements change, I’ll re-examine the situation: Textpattern, for example, looks quite interesting. bBlog is itself based on the very clever Smarty templating engine which provides separation of content from presentation. The idea of this is that designers, or non-experienced users, can manipulate visual elements of a site without having to dive into complex PHP, on which this engine is built (this is good, as PHP makes baby Jesus cry - though not as much as Perl).The other part of the site at the moment is a photo gallery powered by Gallery 2. This software also runs on PHP & Smarty, and is open-source; I found it through this article in Lifehacker. I’m very impressed with Gallery2; it has all the functionality I need and plenty more I don’t know what to do with, as with as a large amount of user-contributed content.

Speaking of user-contributed content, the themes I’m using for both bBlog & Gallery2 have been created by members of their respective communities. In bBlog, it’s a port of the Kubrick theme from Wordpress, with a few tiny modifications (changing category headings, for example), while in Gallery2 I’m using the classic theme with no colourpack, and the Kubrick header to give it a passing resemblance to the main site. I considered hacking a Gallery theme to a Kubrick look-a-like, but then I’d run into the original problem: whenever I changed the blog theme - which I will ’cause I’m fickle like that - I’d have to re-hack the gallery theme, which is just too much to bother with. I might still fiddle with it a bit; I don’t like the full page layout in the Classic theme, but it’s probably more practical for pictures. I’m still looking for some review software to put on the site. I have a bunch of hacked-together scripts for adding authors, stories, recommendations and gathering & ticking-off stories to read, but they’re pretty clumsy, and I’d much rather have a cohesive recommendation/review engine that would allow me to:

• Add, search, edit story reviews, recommendations
• Add links for stories to read
• Comprehensively tag entries, and find entries using both tags & full-text search
• Totally customise look-and-feel, mark stories as read, bundle tags

At the moment, I’m looking for a dedicated platform - so far, I’ve only found story archiving software like eFiction with recommendation features which isn’t what I’m looking for. I could use a light-weight CMS/blogging software but that would require having each review/rec in a separate entry. At the moment, I’m getting the tagging & bundling features by using del.icio.us (see my links here), but it obviously have all the functionality I need. An alternative is using a wiki, possibly a single file version like TiddlyWiki which allows entry tagging, but I really want a full-on database with individual field categorisation & search facilities. Back to Google, I think. ETA: For some reason, I got it into my head that Wordpress had free & paid versions with restricted functionality in the free version. Since this doesn’t appear to be the case I’d definitely look at it again in a few months, particularly given the feature list and variety of themes.