Plum Blossoms

After some searching, I found XAMPP, a self-contained web server program that can be installed in Windows without fussy Registry entries. I unzipped the baby on the flash drive. Step one: done.

Now to choose a blogware application. There's plenty of good applications to choose from, but ironically I didn't go with Movable Type because it requires Perl, which would take up too much space on the flash drive. WordPress, as my inspiration, was my original choice, but I had trouble with the MySQL server program on XAMPP. Finally, I went with Pivot, which doesn't require any sort of database.

After some further unzipping and clicking, I ended up with the following. Notice the URLs containing localhost.

Well it worked, I'm proud to say. I'm not sure what one should do with it, though. Running the web server and the blogware seems a lot more work for a private journal that a plain old Word document will whoop any day. And there's no way you can run a web site off this thing. But it's still cool to see something work. And I'm sure someone with greater geek credentials than myself will do something like this to show off (with, of course, a bigger flash drive than 128 MB).