As some irc acquaintances of mine already know, choosing a blog platform turned out pretty difficult for me. Actually, let me retake that, finding a blog platform that didn't suck turned out a veritable odyssey. Now it's been about a week and one national holiday since my struggles so I can hopefully recount my tale w/o resorting to tuomov-style rhetorics.

My ideal platform would be a blog compiler with some cgi to handle comments. I want to keep my posts in a darcs repo and serve static html when it's possible. Markdown support and code syntax hilighting would be bonuses. I'd like to plug in HsColour. Doesn't sound so hard right?

When discussing my plans I received two platform suggestions: blosxom and chronicle. Originally I had nanoblogger in mind but it soon turned out it just wouldn't do. I set up chronicle but started experimenting with other engines. Here's the rundown:

Blosxom

features

• cgi, implemented in perl (ports to various other scripting languages available)

problems

• had to push data into blosxom's datadir with a custom makefile for two reasons:
  • wants control of the blog posts
  • no formatting support, posts would have to be in html
• using markdown was a hassle because blosxom wants some unformatted information (title etc) in the beginning of a post file
• wants publish date to be the same as file mtime (doesn't play well with version control...), can be fixed with a plugin
• the comment plugin really is ugly
• many of the plugins were dead or the authors use wordpress nowadays
• uses home-grown template system and not, for instance, Text::Template

Chronicle

features

• a blog compiler, comments available as a very hacky cgi add-on
• supports markdown and html

problems

• the version in debian seems has outdated documentation and seems not to really support the comment plugin
• have to do syntax colouring with a makefile

Nanoblogger, bashblogger, vee

• blog compilers
• want control of the posts, have own version-control-systemish thing
• formatting with a shell pipe mostly
• comment support ugly or missing

Ikiwiki

features

• a wiki compiler, blogging available with a plugin
• wants posts in markdown
• (IMO ugly) git support
• nice commenting support

problems

• overkill? a real mess to configure at least
• plugins for mostly everything but not for just piping blocks through a second formatter...
• I really don't like the way ikiwiki uses git: there's one central copy, and committing to it launches a hook that makes ikiwiki pull changes into its own working copy

Wordpress

(no, I didn't try it, I have enough experience with this monster already)

problems

• de facto standard
• ugly as hell, wants posts written with a web cli
• wants sql db
• implemented in php

So here I am, back using chronicle and not that pleased with it. Ikiwiki would be perfect for the job were it not for the need to write my own plugin (I already have) and some ideological problems. Maybe I'll get around to switching to it some time in the future.

Update 2008-06-23: language