Oh look — as if I needed one, another reason not to join Facebook. Call me the last holdout if you like, but I’m an antisocial misanthrope (as opposed to the kind who like to hang out with people just so they can torture themselves with all the stupid things humans do), so why would I join yet another social networking site, especially one as overrun with sheer stupidity as Facebook? WTF are those “games”? I don’t even game. I play Solitaire, or the Mahjongg game my Ubuntu setup comes with. And I haven’t had a computer virus in years, and I don’t want one.

Facebook and other sites like it have nothing for me. I do like Tumblr, mostly because it has a simple interface and lots of nice themes, and the social networking stuff isn’t too intrusive — but at the same time it’s becoming something of a headache. For one thing, there are too many Obama fans (but I might as well say that about life, and I can at least tweak the Tumblr folk with one of my obnoxious posts — I can’t do anything about the real life ones except roll my eyes at their bumper stickers) and the Doctor Who fans on Tumblr all seem to be the young type who just got into Tennant’s Doctor and they’re all Doctor ‘n’ Rose shippers, barf.

But that leads me to my next topic. I’m getting less and less pleased with WordPress. Not that it’s a horrible program — it’s not — but it’s getting more and more complex as it gets more and more popular. I’d say it’s about as popular now as Movable Type was a few years ago, and it’s getting more and more commercial in its focus. I don’t have anything against a commercial focus in general, just not for me and my site. A few years ago I briefly experimented with ads on my blog, but I decided to dump them. Ads just aren’t for me, no matter how skint I am. All there will ever be is a Paypal link at most, and you see that I have even taken that off the front page and put it over into a page titled “Coffee Fund.” Anyway, WordPress is very complex and heavy these days, and it just does more than I want a blog program to do. Here’s what I want: a simple interface where I can post, a simple way to set up the site theme, a way to control comments so you can weed out spam and trolls, and… that’s it. The only extras I can think of that I’d also like would be a way to add static pages, but they aren’t absolutely necessary. Even configurable side menus for links and latest entry lists and so on aren’t absolutely necessary, though some kind of archive listing is good for people who want to read your back catalogue. Most of the Tumblr setups do this sort of bare bones thing, and their interface is easy as pie for adding posts. They also have split posting types into different things: regular text entries, videos, audio files, links, and chats. They also have this reblogging thing which is nice but it’s internal to Tumblr blogs. I don’t entirely like the setup but it is easy to use and uncluttered. I’m sick of clutter.

Anyway, I’ve been trying out different blogging programs, some of them in their infancy or at least toddlerhood, and I will be reviewing them here over the next few posts. If I find one that comes closest to what I want I may do the site over. We’ll see.