I detest New Year's Eve, and I'm not an enormous fan of the Gregorian Calendar , which seems to me to be one of those aggravatingly archaic measurement systems, which whilst possessing romance and historical pedigree in gross quantities, really don't scale too well to the modern age. And don't get me started on time-zones ...

Database-nerd pedantry aside though, I do really like New Year resolutions. I like the idea of working at self-improvement, and consequently I always make a goodly set of targets for myself, mostly privately. They're not always focused on tangible goals, and those that are I often fail to meet, but then, stretching oneself is sort of the point.

Probably the silliest scheme I'm going for in 2008 is to quit drinking alcohol. Not that I think I have a problem, as you're traditionally obliged to add as a follow up to that statement. As a regular alcohol user though, I do think it will present an interesting challenge, and I suspect it will have a generally beneficial effect on my health, and also my bank balance. I'm in good company too, it seems like Richard Herring is joining me on my quest.

I'm going to leave myself the cop-out clause, of still allowing champagne. Firstly, it allows me to join in the toasts at significant social gatherings. Secondly, it lends an air of faux-class, as by champagne, I mean your actual champagne; none of your prosecco or cava, thanks very much. Thirdly, if I find myself regularly buying crates of champagne at bulk discount for home consumption, I'll have good grounds to accuse myself of hiding a drink problem.

Another good thing about breaking in a new year, is that it encourages change. I've already indulged in some long-neglected home improvement work, and I've extensively rebuilt and replumbed this website to use the WordPress system for the blogging bits. The base URL has changed , and there's now a wider variety of detailed feeds . I'll endeavour to maintain all the old permalinks and feeds with redirects, and I've migrated all the old content across. There is bound to be breakage, so let me know if you spot anything.

Previously, I was using a publishing system which started out as the marvellously simple blosxom , which progressively grew less marvellous and more complex as I hurriedly hacked new features into it on demand, or whenever the mood caught me. Blosxom is ace, and if the idea of a blogging tool that is just a perl script that builds static content and uses text files within the filesystem instead of a database strikes you as intriguing, you should definitely give it a go.

Blosxom development seems to have stagnated for a long while, although there's recently been more activity , and my slapdash customisations had grown crufty and brittle enough to make my publishing environment fragile, and irritating to change. And so, WordPress. This brings all sorts of new features I've been asked for, but too lazy/busy to add in the past (comments!), extensibility and an active development, and it's based on the industry lowest-common-denominator combination of apache / PHP / mysql, so I can keep control of my own content, yet can easily move it to pretty much any cheap-ass hosting provider under the sun if needs be.

And as an added benefit, I expect I'll be posting more frequently, at least until the novelty wears off.

posted by cms on 2008-01-09 17:33:41