There is a common habit in sysadmin tools of using ad-hoc methods to extract information out of the less thanimmediately helpful output of the vendor's programs. Bang together some sed , some awk , some grep , and so on, and you can quickly get whatyou need, generally in something that you can still understand once thedust settles.

I do this for some tools, in some situations. But increasingly I amwriting real parsers for things with complicated output. The problemis that an ad-

Despite their issues , blog engines based aroundthe idea an entry is a file are undeniably popular (after all, I wrote one myself). Clearly there is something inherently attractiveabout the idea. In fact, I think there are two main attractions:

• you can do a lot of things by hand in a simple environment, startingwith writing entries. You do not need to log into an administrativeinterface and start ticking checkboxes and filling in form fields;you go to a directory and start your editor or whatever.