It isn't mine, but I'll pretend to love it anyway.

Some of you may remember that Pwnee already has a blog, self-hosted and partially self-created. The blog was a satisfying Frankenstein of Wordpress and AWS, with an invisible Python soul that I lovingly crafted from scratch to form the backbone of the simplest blog possible. It didn't even show dates of posts!

Why did I even write that monstrosity in the first place? We started out with a vanilla Wordpress install, hacked to pieces to conform to the layout of our website. I'd never touched PHP before, but by some grace of Knuth my meddling didn't destroy the install, and things were working pretty well. But it was slow. Not least of all because it was hosted on a shared Godaddy box (I KNOW, DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT. This was before SOPA. Godaddy was still sleazy, but to my defense, I really like race cars in commercials). Anyway... we were just then getting some attention on reddit and the likes, and pwnee.com was about to implode into a pool of HTTP request molasses. So I decided to half-convert the blog (and almost all of pwnee.com) into static pages hosted on AWS. I forged some Pythonic Scripts of Helpfulness to allow me to easily add new entries into the blog, and added a really important looking bullet point to my infinite to-do list:

• Add support for commenting.

That was 6 months ago. The good news is the static hosting on AWS has been awesome. Not literally the fastest provider in the world (although there are additional things like CloudFront to make it even better), but it was pretty fast, and stable. But no comments. It wasn't really a place for the community to get involved. I kept telling myself I would add commenting and then really, truly start blogging regularly... but, well, making a game is hard, and the little time I have not-programming is usually spent pretending like I'm asleep while my mind loops through my to-do list like it's a block of DRAM personally responsible for refreshing to maintain integrity.

Your brain on DRAM

The commenting system was never going to get written. I wanted to write it. I wanted nothing else but to take a break from programming Cloudberry to program a totally new beast. It was going to be fast and shiny and totally better and more stable than any other commenting system ever. But ultimately, I was just using my desire to write my own system as a poor excuse for not blogging. As hard as it is to accept, you don't always have the time to make the perfect system, sometimes you need to go with the 99% solution that comes ready-made in a shiny box that smells slightly of chemicals, but in a good way, really, don't look at me like you don't sniff that stuff too, I know it kills brain cells, damnit.

Right... so, uh. Oh, blogger.com! The 99% solution. It's not mine. I didn't write it. I didn't craft it lovingly from the forlorn nights of my fleeting youth. Nope. I signed up, swallowed my fear that Google is taking over the world and owns too much of my data, and started writing this blogpost. Because Pwnee needs a blog. For the people! Rah-rah-rah-rah.

Now leave some goddamn comments to make me feel better!