I wish you all a very Happy New Year! Immer munter bleiben!

Yes, I love those funny cat videos :-)

Just in case anybody wonders: The song played in this video is "Auld Lang Syne", a Scottish poem that dates back to 1788. The song is well known in many English-speaking countries and traditionally sung to celebrate the start of a new year.

Update 2009-01-04

While routinely checking my site for web standards compliance I learned that inserting Youtube videos with the standard code they provide breaks the validation. Stylehack as written an interesting article on this issue and how to get around it.

This has to be one of the funniest forum threads I've seen in quite some time. Enjoy :-)

It took only a few hours (mainly template design) to adapt the Habari weblog software to fit my site. Let's see how well (or not) it works...

For 2009 I've planned to switch the management of my site from plain HTML to a reasonable blogging software in order to bring a little more life to this site.

Now, there are plenty of blogging solutions to choose from and I have used quite a few of them in the past. I used Wordpress for most of the time, but I've also been trying a lot of others (see list below).

For my current site, which is a personal just-for-fun project, I don't expect a lot of traffic and since my blogging will be rather sporadic, I have fairly sparse requirements. In spite of that, I was tempted to use Wordpress again, but since my web host doesn't provide a mySQL database server (which costs extra), that's out of the question.

After investigating a bunch of current blogging solutions, I ended up with Habari which is, although still in its very early stages, a very promising project. It provides all the things I wanted and it runs on SQLite, thus not needing a database server. Additionally it is very easy to customize the templates and I had adapted the site design in almost no time.

I decided to give it an extended try and run it as my new blogging system to see how well it performs in regular use. Since there are already a lot of sites out there that use it, it seems to do quite well. I'll keep you updated on this matter...

Choosing a blogging solution isn't as easy as it sounds. It's a matter of technical and personal requirements, usability, and of personal taste. Below I've compiled a list of the blogging software I've been looking at. If you would ask me for a recommendation I would name Wordpress, Habari, DotClear as my personal favorites. But they may be perfectly unsuitable for your own needs. So, I fear you have to try them for yourself.

List of blogging solutions I've tried (in random order):

• Habari
• Wordpress
• Dotclear
• Bloxsom
• Coranto
• Eggblog
• Flatpress
• Globber
• Greymatter
• Poster
• Lifetype
• Movable Type
• MP:Personal Weblog
• NanoBlogger
• NewsPro
• NucleusCMS
• PivotLog
• Serendipity
• SimplePHPBlog
• Textpattern
• ELog
• RazorCMS
• SNews
• Thingamablog (Desktop Blogging Solution)