Ches’s blog
Ches’s blog
I’ve been on Nantucket for 48 hours. The van has arrived, shopping is done, and I’ve finished my first book, a retread from way back by Pournelle. The problem with having a poor memory is that you forget that you’ve read the story, but have an odd idea about what is going to happen.
I have been keeping notes in a blog, well, a diary, at http://www.cheswick.com/ches/diary.html This has worked fine, but I realize that RSS feeds really are a useful tool for allowing people to keep up with your thoughts, without polling the web pages, which is a pain.
So I need to set up an actual blog, with RSS capabilities. In fact, I will probably need two, one for personal stuff, and one AT&T Research internal one for company business. If I can tell the difference.
I’ve chatted with Steve Bellovin, Matt Blaze, and Ed Felton, all major bloggers, about the software they use. The issue is this: most blog software is based on PHP, and most compromised BSD machines are compromised by PHP. It has a dangerous design, and is dangerous to use. I wish to sponsor this software on machines I care about, running web servers I want to continue to trust.
My (our) needs are simple: off-line text creation, copy to the web page, RSS feeds available, no comments or other external write capabilities needed. If people want to comment on my blog, they are free to send me email.
User are a pain. I recommend that you avoid them whenever possible.
So now I am typing a blog entry into iWeb using the blog template. I will “publish” to a local folder, rsync that to my web site, and see how it works. And how would RSS fit into this? I actually don’t know: I have never studied this protocol. A month on Nantucket gives a little time for such pursuits. Or, as they said 250 years ago, perfuits.
Well, this seems to work just fine, including the RSS feed. I just publish to a local directory, rsync to the web server, and push it out. This is about right, and presumably as secure as my web server, which will be described in another entry.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Odd Blog Skins