I needed to add a blog to a website. Nothing fancy, just a simple blog, but it had to be quick. I've looked at many blogging programs over the years and eliminated them as possibilities for one reason or another. One of those was DasBlog. I was turned off by the fact that it writes the data to an XML file. I figured real software would use a database. But I was desperate and decided to give it another chance. One big thing in its favor is that it creates search engine friendly URLs. Most of the simpler blogging packages do not - they use querystring parameters. For search engine optimization, though, distinct URLs was a must. I installed DasBlog and started playing around with it. The installation was very easy. Not having a database and all the extra permissioning that goes along with it really sped things up. I was pleasantly surprised to find it had quite a few themes. It was easy to find one that looked close to our existing website and then modify it. I also rearranged the items in the right-side column. I had set it up on our test server. To get it to the live server, I just FTP'ed the whole directory, added write permission to a few folders and modified one configuration setting. Another side benefit to not having a database, is that I could tell the content writer that after entering data on the test server, she can FTP her entries to the live server herself.

I am very pleased with the performance and ease of use with DasBlog on our website.