blog software

[Seth Gordon]

Stephen Adler wrote:
> Guys, I'm thinking of setting up a blog site. Is there any OS blog 
> software or package you guys can recommend?

I use Textpattern, but if I were doing it all again then I would 
reluctantly use Wordpress.

I say "reluctantly" because almost all the significant blog platforms 
that I've looked at have two attributes that I consider misfeatures:

(1) They use PHP (even Movable Type uses PHP for its dynamic elements). 
  I'm nervous about entrusting my personal server's security to the guy 
who wrote my blog platform and the guys who wrote every plugin to my 
blog platform.

(2) The data model essentially treats a blog page as a giant string, and 
all the elements of the page (individual articles, the blogroll, etc.) 
as substrings to be pasted into a template.  So if you want your page to 
be valid XHTML, you have to make sure that every tag produces a valid 
XHTML fragment and that they all combine to produce valid XHTML.  I 
would rather have a templating system that treated a page and its 
elements as DOM trees and only serialized everything at the last step.

But it seems like everyone who shares my opinion on these matters has 
rolled his or her own blogging software from scratch, which is not 
something I have the time to do right now, so I put up with what I've 
got.  And the Wordpress people seem to have a savvy enough development 
team that they patch security-related bugs before too many bad guys take 
advantage of them (alleviating (1)) and they at least try to make their 
own tags XHTML-clean (alleviating (2)).