Captain's log, stardate 318346.75

Day two of my journey into the blogosphere (a word which I actually don’t like too much – it just doesn’t sound “right” to me). The response so far has been – Ahem – overwhelming. Apart from (blog-)search-engine spiders – I had only three presumably human visitors so far, including Mark who gained the prize for being the first commenter. But that’s not surprising, since I told nobody about the blog…

The domain technozid.de has been around for years, but it had no content worth mentioning. Since it was not linked from anywhere it never got visited by a spider before. So I was quite surprised to see a swarm of spiders browsing the first post to my blog within minutes. How did they know? The answer – of course – is simple: WordPress kindly announced the existance of my blog to Ping-o-Matic once I published my first post. Well, you live and learn, and this whole blog-issues seems to be full of surprises.
In the meantime, the spiders of the Cyber-Trinity – Google, MSN and Yahoo – have visited my blog as well. Rather surprising, Google’s MediaBot paid a visit even before the regular GoogleBot spidered technozid.de. Which is funny because MediaBot is supposed to visit only those sites with AdSense on it – which is not the case for this blog.

On a sidenote: do spiders form swarms? Or do they rather form flocks, or packs? Hmm… guess they are loners after all…

I am finding my way into WordPress now. It’s actually pretty straightforward, though I would recommend at least basic HTML knowledge for anyone who wants to try it. Since almost two years I work with the open source CMS Typo3, and compared to the steep learning curve of Typo3 WordPress almost seems like a joyride. Nevertheless, there are problems with WordPress too, especially with different plugins, but in all honesty it would have surprised me if there would have been NO problems at all.
The similarities between Typo3 and WordPress are quite large. So moving from one towards the other is quite easy. Starting with WordPress might even be helpful to make the Typo3 laerning curve less steep. Actually it has been discussed t0 incorporate WordPress into Typo3, but this thread has not been updated lately. I am considering to develop an extension for Typo3 (or a plugin for WordPress) so that the two systems are able to share the same database. Blog entries in WordPress could act as items for Typo3’s tt_news extension and vice versa. I need to think a bit more about this though.

OK, so much for today. I’ll check in later and maybe work a bit on the design template too. Unfortunately the weather isn’t what I hoped for. Mostly (heavy) rain outside, but the day is still young.