Mistweb Ltd

Hi. I have a plan to develop something like a blog on this site. The idea is that I'll ramble on, and publish ideas and examples, in much the same way as I did on my sailing site some years ago. But this will be about my current favourite subject, which is the development of some industrial-strength, unit-tested, object-oriented software for web use.

The differences between this and a 'real' blog will include the fact that you, the world and his dog will not be able to add your ramblings underneath mine. The reason for this at the moment is that the hosting of this web-space (PlusNet) doesn't include server-side coding or database access, let alone a built-in blogging system. No doubt I could get them to switch something on if I made the effort, but to begin with, let's see if this difference turns out to be a benefit or a loss... In the meantime, I'm planning to set up a new mailbox on my email domain and find a way to publish its address on these pages (so as to avoid some of the worst excesses of the spammers). Then you can email your blog-like comments to me, and I'll post the best of breed onto the bottom of the relevant articles. Slow, and not very Web 2.0, I know, but it may lead to a more thoughtful progress. If it's too much hassle or turns out to be counter-productive, I'll have to rethink, of course.

Another difference compared to a 'real' blog is that I'm typing this in gedit (which, for those not familiar with GNU-Linux is like Notepad, but better), so I have to type the HTML (and in the near future the CSS, JavaScript, etc) as I go. This is good practice for me! And it also gives me much more flexibility as to how I make things look. The downside may be that I get fed up with the complexity and start to long for some built-in server-side assistance. If that's the case, maybe I'll just hunt down some blog-space somewhere and move over to that.

3 Jul 2008

Here's the first entry. I'll put some kind of menu structure on here soon, I promise!