Why this blog won't last; investigating alternatives

I have thouht about setting up a blog for some time, but have been leery of doing so. It seems to have the potential to become an enormous time-sink, there are various aspects of hard-core blogging that seem very pointless to me, and the tech behind it (including RSS) feels shakey to me. But Planet Debian rather pushed me over the edge, so I'll give it a try before passing judgement.

This weblog is using pyblosxom (as I type this I add "iab pybloxsom pyblosxom" to .vimrc in the other terminal). Individual entries are written on my laptop, then svn added and svn committed, currently by hand. I already have a cron job on my server to svn up my home directory every hour. Before I wrote a single entry, I have to say I thought about this for a while, and I'm quite sure that manually svn adding the file, making sure my laptop is in range and that the network is up, and committing it, is likely to exceed my threshold for busywork very quickly. Which is one reason why this weblog is not likely to last, at least in its current form.

I try to automate everything. With one command, I can automatically lintian check a debian package, gpg sign it, use svn or cvs to commit my changes, tag the release, upload the package to the apt repository on my laptop, (which uploads it to the apt repository on my server, which uploads it to Incoming), update any web site associated with the package with its current version and changelog, possibly upload it to additional repositories as well (CPAN, another apt repo, etc), and possibly mail an announce list to let non-Debian users know about it. I go to these lengths, because if I don't automate it, it won't get done..

So I doubt that I will last one day without growing a "weblog" script that puts up an editor, comes up with a filename based on the title of the entry, html-izes it, svn adds it, and commits it if I am online. That's the obvious quick unix hack.

I think that the longer term hack, and possibly the proper approach, involve email. Ideally, I should just be able to mail an entry to my blog. I have looked around, and this is not a new idea. Hep is a possibly over-specified and -designed thing that can apparently gate email to blog and back. Unfortunatly, it has no security and wants to run as a daemon, and includes its own mail server, web server, and POP server, and is configured over the web. No thanks! Blosxthis is a quick hack that can be fed emails from procmail, does minimal security checking, and dumps them in a directory for use by (py)blosxom. Unfortunatly, it relys on a plaintext password instead of the dead-obvious idea of checking the mail's existing gpg signature (all mail is gpg signed, right?), and does not use headers or htmlise (xmlise?) the mail. I'm seeking something more appealing than either of these.

This guy had the same idea yesterday, and here is an old post from the author of pyblosxom describing something that sounds just about perfect to me. So I'm not the first person to think of this, and there seems to be plenty of activity in this area without me, so I will probably put off doing any work on it as long as possible.

This is getting long, so I will skip going into my opinions about more general weblogs vs email topics until another time.