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Why WordPress

I posted a few months ago on why I used Blogger. The main reason for not self-hosting was:

Without starting the whole religious war – yes there are very very strong open source blog frameworks out there; put it simply I’m just too lazy (or too busy) to get the thing deployed, tweaked, secured and customised for my world.. that’s why I’m posting here.

I wanted more control of the content; as well as the ability to control posting, comments, spam etc. I also wanted to investigate using one of the tools in production. What better way than to host.

As for my choice of WordPress – I like the plugin architecture; the post-editor; the licensing works for me. I also looked at several blog comparisions – and it really came down to personal choice.

Moving blog hosts

I’ve moved my blog from blogspot to a self-hosted WordPress installation.

No particular reason. I just wanted more control over the look and feel of the blog; as well as supporting features like trackback.

Currently running on a crappy old server running SLES 9 with WordPress, Apache, PHP and MySQL. Hopefully the hardware is reliable enough.

I’ll post more on how things progress.

Sudoku – another craze hits the UK

More observations on changes in the UK since we last lived there in 2002..

One noticable theme of our stay in England was that every newspaper seemed to have a Sudoku puzzle in it. Asking around and this is a very recent phenomenon. Even Wikipedia notes that the craze started in the Spring of 2005.

It seems that the Sudoku puzzle craze is just another meme – take a look at this article from The Observer Sunday newspaper from 15 May 2005:

If the first week of May 2005 will be remembered for a general election, the second will go down as the week of Sudoku.

National newspapers scrambled to advertise the puzzle on their front pages, while websites devoted to it sprang up and TV and radio stations caught the new global bug.

Numerous articles have attributed the puzzle, which has a Japanese name, to the mysteries of the Land of the Rising Sun. But its true modern origins lie with a team of puzzle constructors in 1970s’ New York, from where it set off on a 25-year journey to Tokyo, London – and back to New York.

Scientists have identified Sudoku as a classic meme – a mental virus which spreads from person to person and sweeps across national boundaries. Dr Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, said: ‘This puzzle is a fantastic study in memetics. It is using our brains to propagate itself across the world like an infectious virus.’

Indeed.