Vacation over - I'm assuming you've heard the joke before with the punchline "coffee break's over, back on your heads!". After 10 days of the girls and I being home for Christmas break, it's time to go back to work and school. Considering I didn't go anywhere this summer or take any significant time off, this break felt good.
Today is also my friend Will's first day (back) at TDI. As usual Michelle will teach a step class this morning. The girls will again take gymnastics tonight. The usual routine resumes. In yet another out of the ordinary weather circumstance, it's suppose to hit 50°F again. I'm sure the law of averages is going to kick in soon.
Estogen-fest - Since yesterday was the last day of school vacation, the neighborhood friends seemed to come out of the woodwork. No less than five of Claire and Abby's friends were over yesterday. One of the girls goes to the same piano teacher that Claire does. She is quite good but has been taking lessons since first grade. After most of the girls left I helped Claire practice some more. I think seeing her friend play reinforced what she could be doing soon if she focuses. It was the first time we did a live duet together. The song was the classic "Frère Jacques / Are You Sleeping". We wrapped up the day with some takeout Chinese food (and Mario Party 6).
Weblogging - One of the nice bonuses of Mac OSX is that it comes with the Apache web server and the PHP language built in. Both are acknowledged 'industry standard' web design platforms. Having them built into the laptop makes it easy to evaluate many open source web platforms. Over the weekend I checked out three separate packages that do weblogging with PHP. The only constraint I had was that the storage use plain text files and not a separate database. Nearly all weblogging packages look for a separate MySQL database to store the data. I've seen a number of websites go temporarily down because their connection to the database flakes out for a short time, usually due to being overloaded.
I looked at Blosxom.PHP, Simple PHP Blog, and Pivot. All worked as advertised but none seemed snappy, at least compared to the static content that MovableType generates. True, MovableType is a bit sluggish when comments are entered because it's rebuilding some pages, but once the content is setup, it flies. I occasionally consider a switch, but in the end always seem to stick with MovableType. Perhaps I should have spent the time upgrading versions (currently up to 3.14 vs the 2.661 I'm using), but I wanted to look around a bit and see what's new in competitive solutions.