The Three Princes of Serendip

Once I set out on something I move forward in a very fast pace. Information is absorbed at alarming rates, options are weighed and a decision gets reached. Were my brain possessed of a gag-reflex I am certain it would explode within hours of beginning any project with the sheer volume of data that is force-fed into it. Of course a good chunk is lost minutes after it is processed, but not before a decision is made on the information. Thanks to the Information Age that we live in, I don't really have to worry about holding on to all of it anymore, which makes decision making move even faster.

When it came to creating a weblog of my own I went at it with the same, not-so-reckless, abandon. I consulted with friends, viewed websites, read the propaganda, looked at other weblogs and even took a look at the products offered directly through our web host. And then I stopped, took a breath and went over to the SANS Institute website. All the weblog scripts and engines and backends I could remember at the time were sent straight into their search bar. Unfortunately for me, all of them returned results, and relatively recent ones at that.

If you are not familiar with the SANS Institute, they are IT when it comes to IT Security. Training, articles, research, advice, certification; they are the people you go to in order to get the information you need about IT Security. So when articles came up in my search for my weblog choices, I was a little put out. Each of these news blurbs contained some sort of recent exploit or loophole in the security of the web application, which is not generally a good thing for any application, let alone one sitting open to everyone on the Internet. The more exploits that show up, the more you will likely want to find a different program.

So I began looking further, refining my search and looking at security as part of the key ingredients for my new weblog application. Some how, on page 87 of my google search or so, I came across an interview type article about Stefan Esser leaving the PHP Security Team. Well, I needed a break from the search so I read it. While the article was informative, it was that glorious shining link pointing to this man's, this PHP Security Guru's weblog: http://blog.php-security.org/

Should you not have guessed by now, Stefan Esser uses Serendipity for his weblog. A quick check over at SANS and a few other security related sites revealed to me what I already knew, this is a pretty secure piece of coding. There was one entry from version 0.7-beta1, but I am good with that.

After looking through the Serendipity website and installing a test of the software on the Proverbs server, I was hooked. Easy to setup, easy to use, customizable beyond belief, a ton of plugins, very nice layouts and it hit the marks for security. For me, however, the best part is the affirmation that I get to keep "Serendipity" as my favorite word.