I was just pondering blogging and was thinking about the history of this blog. The very first post on the blog was 8/2/02 and it is amazing that it has been continually operational for almost 6 years. There have been ups and downs of frequency of posts, but I am back now.
Another note of interest is that over the years, I have used 3 different blog engines. This site is a bit different since I am running this software on my own server and so I looked at packages that I could install and run on my server. This is a bit different from most purely web-based services that people may be using. Here is a summary:
Movable Type
The first was Movable Type which was great, but I migrated off of it when they went closed source. They have since changed their model to again offer free software, but they have limited the functionality and so I have moved on. Note: I have no problem with them doing that, it is there perogative, but that is not the software model that I originally signed up for. I am an open source guy and want to stay that way.
WordPress
I then moved to WordPress which was a great product. The one frustration I had with it is that it is fundamentally designed as a single blog application. You can not easily host multiple blogs. There is another version called WordPress MU for multiple users which at the time had limited support. Interestingly, I only host one blog, but felt strongly that I wanted a multiple blog platform.
B2Evolution
This is the final blog platform that I settled on and am running today. I am quite happy with it. It is more complex than WordPress, but offers the advanced multiblog feature set that I wanted. There has been quite a bit of development on the platform and the most recent 2.x.x release is great and highly recommended I still really like the platform and have no plans to migrate off of it any time soon.