The past seven days have been very odd. First my car died. Died as in when the mechanic comes out and tells you that he can fix it, but the cost to fix is going to be more than the car is worth.

Then my web sites disappeared from the face of the Earth thanks to a mixup between the telco. company and my web host. Here’s my big lesson from that — a week without constant weblogging sucks.

And it also became obvious that we needed another computer — my wife was trying to finish her thesis and ran into a lot of problems thanks to the relatively old machine I had her working on.

Oh, and I discovered that thanks to the lack of oversight by my predecessor in my position at work that the department I manage is actually running a deficit about twice as high as I had originally thought (I know where you’re coming from about the high cost of T1 connectivity, Seth!)

Fortunately, this is the United States where pretty much any problem can be solved by an influx of cash and credit. New car, new computer, new ISP for the web sites (though still handled by Macrobyte despite the outage — more on that later). They say money can’t buy happiness, but what else are you going to use it for?

Whew — after almost a week of being offline, we’re finally back up and running. More on weblog withdrawal (it sucked), customer service and Brian’s new toy on Wednesday.

John Hiler wrote an interesting roundup of the various blogging software that is out there. One of the problems with such roundups, of course, is that people are often looking for very different things from blogging software. Hiler’s piece is still helpful, though, because I think he’s pretty clear on what he wants and, therefore, what his criteria is.

I don’t agree, for example, with his assessment of the advantage of a database-driven site over a flat-page oriented site,

Why didn’t Hosted Weblogs ever really catch fire? I’m sure there are lots of opinions, but here’s my take: database-backed sites are just more complicated than their static cousins. You have to have more hardware and software backing them up, and they’re harder to figure out for designers who aren’t comfortable with programming.

That’s not to say that database-based dynamic blogging software isn’t a hot area: in fact, half of this survey is dedicated to Weblog Community software which falls in that category. It’s just that dynamic sites tend to work best when they promote community features that tap the power of having a database: comments, site tracking, community interaction…

Okay, on the first part I think he’s absolutely right. Database-driven systems are more complicated. But a database-driven system should give you a hell of a lot more than “comments, site tracking, community interaction.” Frankly, some database-driven systems don’t give much more than that, and I question what the point is of using a database system for such sites.

People already know my view of Conversant, but Movable Type is also headed in the right direction with more useful metadata features such as categorization and other features. It still can’t do everything I would need, but it’s a good system.

The odd thing is that people are apparently not happy over what Hiler had to say about their favorite blogging software. Hiler wrote today that,

Umm… some people take their blogging software pretty seriously. I am finding it helpful to think about each flavor of blogware as a separate religion faith. Depending on what software you’re using, you’re either a believer… or a heretic condemned to blogging hell.

How pointless is that? Blogging is not a one-size fits all activity, and there are as many different things people want out of weblogging as there are software packages.

For example, as much as I love Conversant, if all you want to do is make an update or two a day to a weblog and don’t care about comments or more advanced features, then Blogger or Blogger Pro is probably a better fit. Its limitations, on the other hand, caused me to abandon Blogger after just a couple months.

The more ways of updating a weblog, the better.

There is a protest planned for 10 a.m. July 25, 2002 in front of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, DC, which is at 601 New Hampshire Avenue, NW.

I live a long way from Washington, DC, or I’d show up.

The actual issue that they’ll be protesting is the continued refusal of Saudi Arabian authorities (with collusion from our idiot State Department) to allow an American citizen to leave Saudi Arabia.

Amjad Radwan, 19, was born in the United States — her mother is American, her father Saudi Arabian. The whole family moved back to Saudi Arabia when she was a child. Her mother later divorced Amjad’s father, and tried to regain custody of Amjad, which is just about impossible under Saudi Arabia’s legal system.

But now Amjad is 19, an adult, and an American citizen. She would like to leave Saudi Arabia which is not exactly known for its egalitarian treatment of women. But here’s the problem, under Saudi Arabian law, adult women like Amjad cannot leave the country without permission from either their father or husband.

Amjad’s father so far will not allow her to leave and the idiot U.S. State Department has said that they will respect Saudi law — so even if she should find a way to reach the U.S. embassy and step on American soil, the State Department will do nothing to help this American citizen leave Saudi Arabia.

If the United States wasn’t so blinded by its pro-Saudi Arabian foreign policy, it would simply close its borders to all non-diplomatic Saudi Arabian citizens until Amjad is allowed to leave. But of course our entire Middle Eastern foreign policy is predicated on coddling this corrupt dictatorship.

It’s also surprising that this case has not received more publicity. You’d think that an American woman held against her will by a mysoginistic dictatorship would be a sensationalistic front page story. Maybe this protest will garner more attention for this poor woman’s plight.