Looking to move from my home-brewed blog, I’ve been trying just about everything that’s available from the Hosting Cpanel. WordPress looked good for a while (and even considered redoing the whole site using it), but it was taking more time and giving more headaches than I can spare; plus it automatically became a target for every hacker and spammer in the known universe… Some other blogging software looked to have potential, but was either too fiddly or not responsive.
So I plumped for Dotclear because of its simplicity and customisability. All working great until I tried to log in as Admin the next morning, and it crashed with a MySQL timeout… Reinstalled a couple of times, but still the same. The fact that just browsing to the blog itself was fine showed that the database was OK, so what was going on?! What’s different about an Admin login? Well, it checks for updates by calling home… And dotclear.org was extremely unresponsive… So, I edited admin/index.php to comment out the lines that call home (for updates and RSS feed), and Robert’s your mother’s brother. Annoying and tedious, but I can now switch away from my home-brewed blog.
