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So, Once more I’ve returned to the fictional town of Paddock Wood. I was born within five miles of here, I lived here for twenty years – give or take, what with large amounts of time in Sunderland and the last year in Cambridge, and I’m damned if I’m going to die here.

Why is it fictional? Because it never changes. In the year since I went to Cambridge, the gravel in the back garden has grown two feet into the lawn, and the signs on the Natwest in town have been painted red. And it’s always been thus. In the years I spend away, nothing changes. If I come back for a week, they’ll redo the entire town-centre.

With any luck I’ll be in Reading within the fortnight too.

Simon’s site search thing inspired me to do almost exactly the same thing with Aqcom/Epistula, the search link above (Replacing the FAQ link which wasn’t useful) works using the MySQL FullText stuff, and is whole phrase only until I can find a decent excuse for trying for MySQL 4. The related discussion on Simon’s site that wandered into the realms of Vector Placement Searching is also interesting, and something that I’m considering for [E]3, The Great Rewrite, which will work with Epistula itself being a daemon that sits and serves XML files to a waiting front-end client. This will make it easy to do the heavy data-processing stuff that perl does so much better than PHP, leaving me able to write an interface in PHP (Which I feel works better for the web-facing stuff). The daemon will probably end up being in perl, but I could see Python or C being options for it.

Of course, if I did it in Python I’d have to learn Python, and also provide the ability to import Vellum plugins to it.

What else is around? Oh, yes. The new Six Apart venture of TypePad, a hosted Moveable Type platform (which was mentioned in The Guardian) at around the same time as Dean announces the Textpattern platform, TextBox (Which was not mentioned in the Guardian). May the best system win, and soon Stuart will be announcing Hardback, the new Vellum hosted platform; and Aquarionic Industries will announce Epistulation, the new Epistula Powered hosting platform, sponsered by Snackispores, which will also not be mentioned in the Guardian.