I started the blog in late 2005 as a means for me to document my time in Japan starting the following year. Back then it was a C++ application which I had written from scratch in a lab at a university. Writing it in C++ was an absolute pain as everything had to be done from scratch – and I mean everything: headers, CGI parsing, cookies, HTML, etc. The only thing that I skimped out on was the database abstraction layer, in which, instead, I used libpqxx. (Come on, you didn’t expect me to write a PostgreSQL interface?!)

It was fun maintaining the application but it very soon became a chore to add any new features or even basic ones. So sometime in early 2007 I buckled down and rewrote the blog software in PHP. The rewrite took less time than developing the original C++ version (but not as fun of course) and it became a snap to implement some much needed new features like templates and spam control.

Last month I resurected the blog database, installed WordPress and wrote a few import scripts. My blogging life is easier now and I can leave the development to someone else, since I have no free time for development projects outside of work anyway.