You may have noticed that this blog has changed. For a start, it looks different and there are no postings on it. Thats because I've has some problems with WordPress, my original blogging system, and was forced to get rid of it. A pain, but there you go.
I used this imposed change as an excuse to find a non-PHP based system. As a developer, I really don't like PHP, I think its a fetid heap of parrot droppings - not so much as a considered reaction, more of a viseral dislike.
Ideally, I would have liked to have found a Rails based solution, but sadly, my host doesn't yet support Rails hosting. So, being as I develop it .NET most of the time and as ASP.NET is supported by my provider, I thought I'd hunt out an ASP.NET based system blogging instead. And here it is, dasBlog, an open-source ASP.NET blogging system.
Admittedly, its not quite as easy to set up as WordPress, you may need to get your hosting provider to set some permission for you, and you may also need to make some changes to your sites web.config file, but once thats been done then you're good to go. So far, dasBlog seems to be OK, time will tell.
As there now seems to be a whole new generation of more grown-up web development systems appearing on the scene we should hopefully start to see a sharp decline in the use of PHP. And not a moment too soon in my view. Bias aside, PHP is an insecure, sloppy and inconsistent language that just encourages laziness (OK, that was biased). Hopefully, the newer, more rational, better designed and enlightened frameworks like: Ruby on Rails; Django; TurboGears; Grails and even ASP.NET will give PHP the kicking it so well and truly deserves and punt into computing obscurity.
I hope I have contributed in a very small way to the demise of PHP by drawing my own, faint, line in the sand. Remember people: PHP, together we can fight it.