Well, not exactly. Having blogged previously on [Terra Nova] (http://terranova.blogs.com “Terra Nova”), the original [Creation Engine] (http://secondlife.blogs.com/babbage/ “The Creation Engine”) and currently on the [Official Second Life Blog] (http://blog.secondlife.com/author/babbagelinden “Official Second Life Blog”), I’m not exactly stumbling blinking in to the blinding light of the blogosphere. Recently a number of things have come up that I’ve wanted to write more than 140 words about, but that wouldn’t fit on the Official Second Life Blog [any] (http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/08/15/last-sound-system/ “Last Sound System”) [more] (http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/06/18/slorpedo/ “SLorpedo”), so I’ve finally stopped mooching off other people and set up my own blog.

One reason I hadn’t got around to it sooner is that I’ve been torn between platforms. Although it’s been tempting to throw up a [WordPress] (http://wordpress.org/ “WordPress”) blog every time I’ve had something to talk about, I really wanted to build a blog in [Django] (http://www.djangoproject.com/ “Django”) that I could tinker and experiment with. Although it’s just a matter of [plugging bits together] (http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2007/nov/29/django-blog/ “Where is Django’s blog application?”), it still takes a few hours to get a basic Django blog up and running and longer to add all the bells and whistles. I finally managed to break the impasse last week when I came across this [list of Django blog engines] (http://paltman.com/2008/02/02/i-want-to-move-my-blog-to-django/ “Django Blog Engines”) and after some routing around decided to go with [byteflow] (http://byteflow.su/ “Byteflow”) which has all the bells and whistles but is made of standard Django bits and is eminently tinkerable.

So, that’s what you see here: a default byteflow blog running on [Django trunk] (http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ “Django Trunk”) running in [mod_python] (www.modpython.org “mod_python”) as a virtual host (alongside the [slateit.org] (http://slateit.org “SLateIt”) and [carbongoggles.org] (http://carbongoggles.org “Carbon Goggles”) Django apps) inside [apache2] (http://httpd.apache.org/ “Apache HTTPD”) running on ubuntu dapper on a virtual machine hosted by [bytemark] (http://www.bytemark.co.uk “Bytemark hosting”). It took long enough to get round to, but once I’d found byteflow it only took an hour to set up. I’ll be kicking the wheels and tinkering over the coming weeks, but if you find anything broken, please let me know.