Be­cause this .Text blog­ging ap­pli­ca­tion is suck­ing hard­er and hard­er I looked at some oth­er ap­pli­ca­tions, WordPress be­ing the most promi­nent. WordPress is a PHP+MySQL rig, so we don't ex­pect too much from it. It's nice that it's apt-get in­stal­lable on De­bian, but if we then try to up­load an im­age:

Un­able to cre­ate di­rec­to­ry /usr/share/word­press/wp-con­tent/up­loads/2008/08. Is its par­ent di­rec­to­ry writable by the serv­er?

Huh? We've giv­en WordPress write ac­cess to our MySQL data­base al­ready, why would it need write ac­cess on the filesys­tem to store im­ages? Be­cause some­how the data­base is too crap­py to store blobs with­out a per­for­mance hit, the pro­gram­mers don't know how to do it, or it some­how is a fea­ture to make scal­ing and mi­gra­tion more com­pli­cat­ed than just mov­ing a data­base around?