About

This blog is written by John Jones and covers the topics presented on triplewhitefox.com.

It is currently in its third generation. It started back in 2002 as static HTML pages which, while I didn’t consider it a blog at the time, followed the definition of a blog given as “a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.” I originally used it as a replacement of my page of the pictures section since I wanted to provide more context around the pictures and to branch out from just posting pictures of my car. In that incarnation it was called “Life with the White fox”.

The last post in that old format was in August 2005. Sometime between then and January 2006 I moved to my first real blog software called Blojsom. I chose that because I was and still am a proponent of Java and it was free (as well as the fact that my web host is primarily a Java host). I lived with that for a while but found that it did not fully meet my needs and wasn’t a ‘modern’ blog. It didn’t seem to protect email addresses enough with its limited obfuscation techniques and, as a result, I was forced to setup a secondary email address devoted to it because I didn’t want to expose my main address. As a result, I got tons of spam to that address with it only being used for that blog. So, as a side note, obfuscation techniques do work.

Another thing I didn’t like about it was that I couldn’t easily be notified when someone posted a comment. I would have to look through the posts in order to identify where new comments were left. Also, there was no way to break a post into parts so that you could see just the first paragraph or so of each post with a link to the rest. I had one very long post about my solar light with tons of pictures and it took over the page and made it difficult to navigate to older posts.

I do admit that Blojsom has a very flexible architecture with its allowance of plug-ins to add features and there very well might be plug-ins available to address my perceived limitations. But, even though many times in my daily life I opt for more bell and whistles with possibly higher overhead, for this I really need something simple. I don’t feel the need to become an expert at running blog software.

So, in 2007, I moved to WordPress. So far, it has given me everything I need in a blog. My only complaint is that I have not yet been able to fully eliminate the spam comments and trackbacks. I am pretty close but not 100%.

September 6, 2007