GLFlickrSaver is a an OpenGL screensaver that feeds on Flickr. You set some settings, e.g. from which user’s photostream to feed, and then your screensaver displays images from this user. Nice!

Moreover it’s written in Delphi and it uses dFlickr, an open source API Kit I have written for Delphi and Flickr services. That made me quite happy!

After deciding I wanted to start a blog, I had to look for a publishing solution. The first sites that came to my mind were (in this particular order) :

1. LiveJournal. Famous, online, free.
2. Blogger. Google owns them now, but they were well known long before that.
3. Six Apart. I didn’t know what this company had to offer, but I knew it had to do with blog publishing tools (and that they recently bought LiveJournal).
4. WordPress. Very popular open source publishing tool.

I didn’t visit LiveJournal but went to Blogger instead. My blog was up and running in 5 minutes. Lots of cool templates to choose from, which is nice. I had no problems at all, but since I intended to host my blog on my own servers I moved on.

SixApart was my next stop. Their homepage informed me they offer 2 services / products: Typepad and Movable Type. But it has almost no information about what these are, especially Movable Type. (Note: on a second visit to their site, before writing this post, I found this extremely helpful page: Which one is right for you?. It is on their Homepage, but you have to scroll to the bottom in order to find it)

Anyway I clicked on Typepad and found out it’s a hosted only, non-free solution. I moved on to Moveable Type, and it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. But I could not figure out what plan I had to buy. They have 4 customer categories: Personal, Commercial, Education, Non-for-profit. Each category has 3 - 6 plans available. This gives a grand total of 19 plans! I thought I would be in the Personal category, but no, you can’t use a plan from the Personal category for any business related blog. So when I finally get my mISV going, I would have to upgrade. Moreover each plan permits a different number of authors / weblogs and I could not understand what counts as an author or how they count weblogs. This is what their help has on “Weblog”:

Any active web site, consisting of one or more blogs, that appears at a single URL which has had a new post created or edited in the past 90 days counts as a weblog for your Movable Type license.

Anyway, I then tried to find the Requirements for their software (since you install it on your server). Not easy. I had to download the “Limited free edition” from the Personal category, to find out it is written in Perl. Perl is fine, but not supported on my servers and I don’t intend to install it. (Note: On my second visit I found a mention of Perl in the Features page, near the end). Movable Type is probably a very good product, since so many bloggers use it, but their website didn’t give me the information I was looking for quickly. And since I had one more site on my list, I moved on.

WordPress was the next product I tried and it made my day. It is written in PHP and was downloaded, installed and tested in about 10 minutes. Plus it looks nice, has tons of themes, is documented and popular. It took me about 1 hour to try lots of themes (finally settling on the excellent default theme with a custom header image), do some customisations (e.g. put the subscribe links on top) and mess with the styles a bit (mainly to have a Georgia font used for posts). Congratulations to the WordPress team!

I am in the process of starting a company (micro-ISV if you prefer) and I intend to write about it.

Moreover, I will write reproduce tech news, write about sites and products I use and software development in general. I currently use PHP for web development and Delphi for Windows apps, so most posts will probably be about these technologies.