Choosing a blog script

Choice is good. Too much choice, though, can be a bit of a mixed blessing. When my wife Olga is in a restaurant, it takes her several minutes to decide what to order. It's as if her life depends on making the right decision. I don't make such a meal out of choosing what to eat (pardon the pun) but deciding what blog package to use is a bit more critical because once you have started to use it you're more or less stuck with it. And there are more blogging scripts to pick from than choices on even the most elaborate restaurant menu.

Many people just create an account at a blogging site and they are ready to go. Perhaps that would have been the best option, but I'm new to blogging. It seemed important to me to host the blog myself and integrate it with the rest of the site. Hence my need for some blogging software.

I started hunting through the blog scripts at HotScripts.com, one of the best places to go when you're looking for software to run on a web server. The user ratings there are helpful in sorting the wheat from the chaff, but there is still a lot to consider. When I visited the developer site for some of the most promising products, though, it often looked like the developer had lost interest and there was no ongoing development. Many of these scripts are the product of just one guy (or gal, for all I know) and when they get too busy, or move on to other things, development comes to a halt.

In the end, I decided to go with Pivot. I've used it before, although The PC Guru is the only remaining survivor. It's a bit over-complex for my needs. In fact, Pivot is more of a content management system (CMS) - as you can see, The PC Guru isn't a web log at all - and very powerful if you take the time to look into it. It's well documented, well supported and is actively under development by a team of more than one person. And I was already familiar with it. So in the end, the choice of Pivot was a no-brainer.

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