Well, it’s finally come to it. I’ve dropped BLAT, the system that’s been powering The Lost Realm as a blog for over three years. You might think of it as giving in, but I’m thinking of it as waking up.
Originally, I had major plans for BLAT. It was going to be great. It was going to do things that no one has even thought of. Many of those things are still novel and unimplemented.
So why am I not continuing with development? The reasons are simple, but have taken me three years to realise. Three years. I really am that silly, and I’m going to tell you why.
I started BLAT before blogging engines were popular. I started it for the same reason that “the big boys” like Blogger, Greymatter, bloxsom, Moveable Type, Textpattern and Wordpress did — because there weren’t any reasonable systems out there. I had some features before others did, but I fell behind trying to keep up. I didn’t have comments. I didn’t support trackback or pingback. I didn’t have a very flexible theme backend. I spent far too many nights sitting up wondering how to keep up with “the big boys”. Soon enough, the features that BLAT had that were unique were mostly common-place, and I didn’t know where to go next. I had a system that started ahead of its time, but I couldn’t keep up on my own.
And there it was: on my own. Why was I trying to achieve this on my own? Those that know me will tell you it’s because I’m fairly arrogant and demand things be done my own way. They’re right, but I like to think I’m growing. I can do things my way while working with other people. I can contribute my way along with the ways of others to build something better. I don’t have to do this on my own.
I spent quite some time looking over the various engines to decide which one to start using. I wasn’t looking so much at their features, but at what the development community was like. Wordpress is the closest to my ideology. It’s written in PHP, which I enjoy working with, and the plugin and theme engine works the way I’d always wanted BLAT’s to. In effect, Wordpress is BLAT, missing several features, but with more work done to it.
I plan to use this site to develop Wordpress plugins and code that should take it where I want it to go. I think the first thing to fix will be the look and feel of the site. In fact, I’ve already started on it.
Here’s hoping that the vision I had for BLAT can help the Wordpress community, and that the Wordpress community can teach me something about how I can have it my way without having to do it on my own.
