Darniaq 2.0

A bit over two years ago, I launched Darniaq.com. While I've been discussing MMOs for years, I never had my own blog. So as others have done before me, I decided to use phpNews for the front page and phpBB for forums on the back end. The front page featured an open-comments system where anyone could have their say, and I offered the forums to friends who wanted to discuss their gaming in a more private, registration- and permission-required, setting. This worked well for awhile, but I kept running into issues with the Comments. phpNews offers some control over Comments, but only after they're posted. Further, the only way to manage Comments was to find the article to which they are attached. This wasn't an issue until more people actually started reading this blog, and cross-linking elsewhere. That was when the spambots showed up. Around February 2006, I was trying to pull up some articles from the archives and noticed one was beset by scores of comments. I've never gotten scores of comments here. Occasionally there'll be that sort of discussion if I cross post at Grimwell.com or my article gets picked up by Slashdot, but those are the established communities I mentioned above. So digging in, I see that most of them are from spambots trying to help my male performance or to cure some deep woods diseases. I delete them and got curious. Then I got mad. Apparently, all of my articles from December 2005 on back were smacked all over by spam bots. phpNews does not offer anywhere near the proper tools to manage this so I dug into the myphpAdmin feature my ISP provides and did a whole bunch of SQL searches to get rid of them. I managed to maintain all of the comments from legit users. I figured after the first mass deletion, I'd have at least a year of slow build up, something I could keep up with weekly. I was way wrong. It took the bots all of 24 hours to repopulate my comments with their garbage. Thousands upon thousands of comments. By this point I had enough, and realized I needed a solution. I started digging around for plug ins, things that would let me extend the functionality, maybe requiring users type in what they see from a picture, like Blogspot does. Nothing. I then realized I needed to list out what I wanted from a blog.

• Easy. I'm no programmer. I can hack ok, but I really am dependent on the quality, depth and breadth of truly gifted programmers to get me started, and almost to the finish line.
• Customizable. I need to know I can, in theory, change everything if I ever learn how. I prefer when the system lets me do this through their interface.
• Free. Because free exists and the services that charge didn't seem to offer anything I needed.
• Comment Tools. I needed a way to quickly view all comments, moderate them, block them, allow them, all that fancy stuff. Plus I wanted additional requirements to post them in the first place.
• Plug Ins. I wanted something that was popular enough that a lot of people supported it with their own work. I got spoiled by phpBB.
• RSS Feed. I don't have the time to write every day, and nothing I write is going to be equally interesting to everyone. I love RSS feeds!

With those in mind, I got to looking around. Tools Maybe I just needed to make a Portal off of my forums, post stuff in the phpBB back end and have something like create a front page out of it. I downloaded and installed mxBB, and it worked ok. But there's no way to have users add Comments without getting into the forums, and I really didn't want to have a forum system. Blogs Branching out, I stumble across Blogspot/Blogger, but found both either didn't have the options I wanted (like categories and the ability to pre- or post-date articles) or they weren't customizable enough. Typepad and EasyJournal also caught my eye, but the former wanted a monthly payment and the latter didn't have the realtime Comment controls I wanted. I perused a few more options from these lists until finally landing on Wordpress here. Wordpress Originally I thought I'd use the service where they hosted the blog. But while this service technically had everything I needed, it did not allow for enough aesthetic customization. So instead, I went with the download approach, which similar to phpNews and phpBB2, involved me downloading files, installing them on webspace and configuring the Wordpress to talk to my SQL database. Installation was basically a snap, and I now have access to more features than I ever thought I'd want (I once spurned WYSIWYG post entry. Foolish of me!). Good luck to the spambots! Customization will be an ongoing process, as it always is. But what I really like about Wordpress is that I can spend all that time on aesthetic. I was never really satisfied with the old look. I rushed it so I could start writing and somehow lost two years in the process. Nothing like the permanence of "temporary". So now I get to dig in, build a good site look, and integrate it atop the excellent work of people who really know how to program. So welcome to Darniaq 2.0. Poke around. I tried to maintain the information flow from the old digs.