Today I made the image gallery available again. Taken for itself, of course, this isn't a very spectacular enhancement of the site (since there's anyway only one gallery at the moment).

The far more interesting part was the implementation of the gallery. I wanted something that seamlessly integrates into Habari. After an extensive search on the internet I found nothing that fits my needs and so I finally decided to write my own plugin.

I quickly hacked up some code that does the basic functionality. So far it can be used to include one or more picture galleries in any Habari page or post and it recognizes thumbnail images and creates them if their are missing. To display an image it would normally, quite unspectacular, pop up the selected image in a separate window. To make it look more decent, I integrated it with the amazing LightBox2 library. Apart from this, however, all its settings are currently hardwired and it lacks a configuration interface, so there's room for improvement.

Anyway, I'm quite satisfied with the result and will probably adding the missing parts after a period of testing.

This took less time than expected...Enjoy the new design of theblackzone.net. If you still find some glitches, let me know.

Long time, no see... There've been a lot of things that kept me busy during the last couple of weeks. I'll try to catch up in the next posts. For now, I just want to note that I today upgraded to the latest Habari alpha release. While working with alpha software always tends to be risky, it runs pretty fine so far.

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)