Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

New Memberships Re-Enabled

By Chief Oddball on August 24th, 2003 at 1:30 am

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A couple days ago I had temporarily disabled new member registrations to Oddball Update, given that I wasn’t sure I was going to continue using the pMachine weblog system. Well, after having tried out three different packages of blog software, I’ve decided to delete them all and come back to pMachine. Thus, new memberships have just been re-enabled. Register away.

During my “travels,” I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is no “perfect” blogging software. At least, not for my needs. I’m looking for something that:

  • Is dynamically driven from a MySQL DB via PHP

  • Features user memberships with various levels of access

  • Prevents anonymous comment posting

  • Is extensible and customizable enough to allow me to create alternate indexes and templates

  • Has a feature-rich, easy-to-use content management interface (backend)

  • Does all of the above mostly out-of-the-box without requiring weeks of custom PHP coding

So far, there is no single weblog package that can do all of this well enough to suit me.

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Oddball Update Hits The Big Time!

By Chief Oddball on August 17th, 2003 at 11:26 pm

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Greetings, folks — I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you all to the Oddball Update. I can see your faces now, scrunched up in utter bewilderment at the name I have chosen for this weblog. Well, suffice it to say, it’s a joke of the very, very inside nature, which I don’t expect a single one of you to understand — well, perhaps one or two of you, but that’s about all. In an attempt to allieviate at least some of the confusion, I present this Miniature History of Oddball™.

The original Oddball Update started on March 20th, 1994, at 3:24 am EST. How the hell can I be so specific? Perhaps because I actually time-stamped my first entry into the journal which I called “the Oddball Update”, written in the “Write” word processor accessory that shipped with Windows 3.1, on that date so many years ago. Why the name “Oddball Update?” Because my entire decision to keep a journal was a result of a collection of rambling thoughts which, I was certain, any normal human being would consider quite odd. Essentially considering myself an oddball, but reveling in it, I started the Oddball Update — and kept it updated for the next seven years.

Over that time I eventually traded in Write for Wordpad, and then Wordpad for the full version of Word. But the original format of the Oddball Update remained the same: A huge frickin’ document, sometimes exceeding 70-80 pages, full of random garbage that was not in any way organized save for the start- and end-date and time stamps around each entry. The original Oddball Updates chronicle some of the most interesting and tumultuous times in my life, including several ominous and foreboding entries that accurately foretold of impeding crises.

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