One of the reasons for upping my hosting at mediatemple from the Grid-Service (gs) to Dedicated-Virtual (dv), was to be able to install and run anything I wanted to without having to try clever workarounds to the restrictions in the environment. So far, the extra sysadmin has been offset by the time savings in not having to scour Google for one-off solutions to esoteric problems.

But I was still faced with my perennial problem of picking blogging software that makes me happy.

I’ve used Movable Type, WordPress, Drupal and a few lesser-known options and always end up going with something that allows me to look professional without expending much effort. Who has the best themes? The coolest plugins? The easiest admin interfaces? The most capabilities? With each new version, they seem to leapfrog each other, forcing me to export, convert, import yet again. This becomes a pain as the number of sites I run seems to increase every year.

So I’m trying something different this time through the cycle: WordPress for personal sites (like this one). WordPress for my non-profit sites. WordPress for my photography site (so many good gallery themes!). And Drupal for my company sites (more fine grained control).

Of course I’ll always be on the lookout for cool, new software (as that’s just how I am). But hopefully I can live with this arrangement for a while.