De Culturis
Mundi

Actually I had a blog even before this one. First I discovered the Blogspot but it didn’t last since in those days I got my own domain, so I started to look around for something that doesn’t put ad banners on my page. I discovered Greymatter and with that my blogging experience began. (I can provide you a link to that blog, but don’t rush there — I bet you won’t understand it because it’s in Hungarian. Yep, that’s my mother tongue or, as they say here, my “first language”. And, please, don’t ever tell me that English is my “second language” - it’s the fourth!)

Anyway, back to the blogging tools. Greymatter was good as a kind of school, learning the basics of blogging, and I have to admit there were several features in it that I’d like to see in other scripts, too. So, for a while it was fun.
Later I made another discovery - it was the pMachine and the power of PHP and MySQL. I even installed it for a friend. To be honest I didn’t follow the evolution of the script (but I know they have now a more sophisticated publishing software, too) because I hate any kind of upgrade. If it’s up and working - don’t touch it, don’t fix it! I liked pMachine very much and I consider it an excellent blogging script - or whatever they call it: publishing software? Whenever I see a question on the WP Forum about “how to have a different look for my single entry/archive/etc. page…?” - I can’t help but the first thing that comes to my mind is the 3 templates that came in pMachine: index, comment, archive. Make no mistake, I do not try here to promote pMachine or any other software, I’m just describing my path toward this blog.

Then came along WordPress. I guess I saw it first time at the end of last year, later in March I even mentioned it in my blog as a possible alternative for blogging. Well, the “alternative” happened to be that I stopped posting in April. In the meantime moved from Ontario to Manitoba (for those of you south of 49° these are provinces, a.k.a. ’states’ in Canada :) and a few weeks ago decided to install WP.

One of the things I loved and still love about it - as I mentioned earlier - the possibility of writing in different languages, with different alphabets without having to think for a moment about charset, encoding and all that stuff that made my life miserable when administering a CMS and every author needed a different charset. Grrr… It is also very flexible. If you know some CSS it’s easy to customize. (If you don’t - it’s PITA.) Having a valid code? I don’t know. The average web surfer has no idea what it is. And couldn’t care less. For computer geeks who write for each other, it’s important - I have to admit it. But that’s another topic I want to write about later. I guess the most important thing is (or was) that at this moment WP is exactly what I needed. Plus, it seemed to me that the developers are really interested in making it translatable. (See also the Why? link at the top of the menubar.) So, let’s the adventure begin!

Blogare necesse est! - as the Latin would have said if they had internet.
P.S. Don’t look for the word blogare in the Latin dictionaries; it doesn’t exist, I made it up. But sounds good, doesn’t?