Again, I just moved my “blog” over a new managing system, in this case Textpattern. I quote the term blog because this is not really a blog, but rather my entrepôt à idées.

So why switching to a fully-featured blogging interface. In August I give Posterous a try. Posterous is a nice idea for people who just need to store quotes or photos on a personal website. Since you can write your post and upload them by email, this is really the shortest path. However, there is actually no support for Javascript, whereas I was looking for a cleaner way to embed my LaTEX chunks, through, e.g., jsMath or MathJax (actually, I am running the last one on my website). I must admit, however, that photos looks great on Posterous, with an auto-generated slimbox-like gallery. Embedding code chunks with syntax highlighting was also not so painful, thanks to CodeRay.

Now, what? I have plenty of options to customize my posts (I’ll summarize some of them later), but I feel like I am getting to keep on my old habits: just use links to my Dropbox for images, use a minimal amount of Javascript and rely on CSS for the layout, etc. I don’t really like the idea that all the content and the layout (templates, stylesheets, etc.) are stored in a SQL database. Also, as I must use categories for tagging, I am limited to two tags. Ok, this should be sufficient in most cases, but who knows? I find this critical review, What’s Wrong with TextPattern?, helpful in that it highlights the major drawbacks of TXP, including this stupid idea of storing everything in the database. Another great review is: Textpattern versus Wordpress.

I discover that there is a Textmate bundle for TXP. Provided you activate XML-RPC for TXP, you can even blog from within Textmate! Not that I dislike the TXP admin interface, but if I can rest on my Mac without opening Safari, I’m happy. It’s seems to work but I didn’t manage to get textile formatting works actually (Ok, I just tried with one post!).