Chris Meller

I’ve been idly working on a new theme for this site for quite a long time now. It’s now been pretty much completed, I just can’t decide what to do with the sidebar area. There’s so much somewhat random information that I think should go in the sidebar area that it invariably ends up looking cluttered and becomes a useless mass of text.

I’ve been considering a change in logic. Perhaps instead of placing random things like Flickr photos and Twitter feeds in the sidebar I should take a “gateway” approach (or something similar), in which the first page you see is a list of all the sites I use where you can find their individual feeds. Not only can you get to Flickr or Twitter and find me directly, but you can also click through to continue to my blog.

The only real downside here is that the best URL for such a gateway would seem to be chrismeller.com, which would mean my blog would need to move (either to an entirely new domain, a subdomain, or a ho-hum subdirectory). None of these are really desirable, I like my URL exactly the way it is now.

So the consideration goes on… Eventually I’ll probably just make an impulse decision and throw something up, just to get it out there and get over the decision-making hump.

Back in February I started becoming interested in this new blogging project called Habari. I, like most people, had been using WordPress for years on what passed for my pathetic excuse for a blog.

Over those years I went through phases of love and hate for WordPress as they branched out and tried new things. Often it seemed that the good came hand-in-hand with the bad. While striving to improve their product and push adoption to the masses, many changes seemed to forsake those hard core users who had been loyal all along.

With the creation of the wordpress.com hosted platform and the funding of Automattic to continue to improve and pursue these ventures, things really began to take a turn for the worse. The line between open source and commercial venture began to blur, and continued development seemed to focus on the hosted aspect, rather than the self-hosted community. Some features did trickle back down, but the gap continued to grow as time went on.

Along the way, something totally unrelated to WordPress and the blogging world happened. My coding skills improved. While I had previously been content to harness the awesome power of the WordPress plugin system, I now felt the need to branch out and spread my coding wings. Realizing that the WordPress code base was a mess of PHP4 code, global functions and variables, and lacked any documentation at all, I became frustrated trying to make changes. Since that time, WordPress has attempted to make strides in the documentation and global functions areas, but for the most part the codebase remains as messy as ever.

Looking for alternatives, I happened to stumble upon Habari. Several people I’d known from the WordPress IRC channel had begun to frequent their IRC channel as well, and I migrated over mainly to have more people to chat with regularly. As I became more familiar with the people involved and started participating in some of the arguments happening around functionality and usability, I began to become more and more interested in the product as a whole.

Habari is totally PHP5-based. It doesn