FlatPress has been working great, but I’m still exploring other blogging/CMS systems. I already have one WordPress install on my Hostgator shared-hosting account, and I used Hostgator’s automatic system to install another WordPress instance in a different domain.

That all went well, but what I really wanted was the ability to manage multiple blogs from a single WordPress instance. I made the first configuration change needed, but I couldn’t go further.

Why didn’t it work? I think that as part of the automatic installation of WordPress in Hostgator, it used the same database as my other WordPress instance, and due to that bit of database sharing, somehow I couldn’t get the “networked” blog feature to work.

The automatic installs, whether with Fantastico or Hostgator’s newer tool, are great because you click, click, click and have a service installed, but you then have no idea about how things were done unless you dig into the configuration files.

My database knowledge isn’t exactly broad, and I think the way to learn more is to create the database myself and install and configure the blog/CMS software the traditional way.

That’s what I like about FlatPress — besides not needing a database, you drop your files on the server via FTP, make a few changes, do some configuration (it’s not all text files; there’s a lot GUI in it) and you’re going. You can move it easily, back it up easily and look at the text files that hold your individual entries.

But I still want the multiblog, and I could do it with WordPress, Drupal, or even Movable Type, which I know very well. However, I don’t think that WordPress or Movable Type will allow me to do the one thing I really do want: the ability to write an entry and than target it to my choice blogs, moving it from one to the other (or running it in more than one) at will. That’s what I want.

I got a deal on an Epson Perfection V330 scanner. It runs great in Windows 7 with the voluminous amount of software on the install CD. I hoped that it would work out of the box with Debian Squeeze. No such luck. Sane/Xsane doesn’t recognize it (although it's in the dmesg).

I Googled for and found a few packages that got me going. (Here's a report of this method working in Ubuntu.)

I downloaded, unpacked and installed the driver and scanning software from Avasys, and with a reboot I was able to scan from my Debian Squeeze laptop.

It all works great. Thus far I've only used the Image Scan! software (yep, the name has an ! in it), which does work fairly well by the way.

I imagine these same packages would work for Ubuntu. There are also packages for Mint, Mandriva, CentOS, Fedora, PCLinuxOS and a few others.

You would think that scanners, especially those by companies such as Epson, would either work out of the box or have packages within the Debian (or Ubuntu) repos, if only in non-free. Guess not.

But since the solution was fairly easy to come by, I'm accepting (and now using) it.