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This should be fun.

I've been doing Web sites since the 1990s. I've written my own full-featured CMS systems in Perl (I told you I've been doing this a while) and in PHP, have completely modified open-source CMSes, and have used a number of CMS systems; including Java systems and even ASP .NET systems. I've written many, many plugins, modules and themes.

However, just because I actually have a couple of decades of direct, relevant experience in exactly this, doesn't mean that my opinion will hold any weight at all. This is SlashDot, where poo-flinging monkeys rule the roost. I'll be soundly attacked because I don't drink the right brand of Kool-Aid as some kid out of Java School.

My opinion: You want commercial-grade, the .ASP systems are generally robust as hell, but you need to pay for a good one. Free: You need to go to a PHP-based system. Drupal is definitely the best; but has a Matterhorn learning curve. WordPress is the easiest to set up and actually, despite all the screeching, has very good quality and support up the yin-yang.

There's a couple of off-the-beaten-path CMSes, like TextPattern and EZ. They are actually fairly good, but lack the enormous code base and community support from the "Big 3."

I tend to avoid Joomla. It's easy to set up, has a lot of support, and is about ten thousand times more complex than it needs to be.

I think we're likely to see some good Node.js systems coming out soon. RoR never really made it out the gate, and if you see Perl, like Movable Type (Which is actually a fairly robust and mature system), start running.

FLING POO HERE -->

IOW, [citation needed]

His pornographic website was seized by Iranian legal authorities in march 2009, but Archive.org , a US-based Internet archiving has snapshots of the original website. I don't like to link directly to the slut website. You can access it by going to Internet Archive Wayback Machine , input the name of his website (A-v-i-z-o-o-n- dot com, remove -) and see archives before 15 Mar 2009. You will clearly see Powered by MT at the bottom of the pages, which is linked to MovableType software website .

So, the claims that he was a programmer and is being punished because of writing a computer program for the website is clearly wrong.

He's not a programmer, and he was not involved in any dating site. He had a site called Avizoon (means SLUT in english). Have you heard of a "dating website" with such name? He was involved in child pornography, abusing private images and films stoled from people's computer using several hired men, and now his lawyer claims he's a programmer!
Let's look at what he calims Malekpour has written: A Perl/PHP program called: Movable Type . As far as I know an American company with the name of Six Apart is the developer, and not a stupid porn distributor called Malekpour. See this screenshot from his website.

The ActionStreams plugin for Movable Type technically does something similar. It accesses public web sites for information about your other accounts and aggregates them on your blog. I wonder if this ruling would have affected that if the Globe had lost.

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

Mr. Drunken Batman uses ye olde Movable Type for all his blogging needs.

There are plenty of CMSs out there that produce static html files as their output. MovableType, as much as I hate to plug them, is one. There are others.

There is nothing inherent to CMSs that cause this CPU hit you are talking about. Certain CMSs are designed for highly-dynamic sites where MovableType's 'rebuilding' method would become annoying, and others are designed for sites that still need the benefits of a central CMS but are more static. And then there are still more than combine aspects of both, like Wordpress with the Staticize plugin.

Why the links to "every other blog"? Those are not blog sites, just links to blogging software. More appropriate links would have been to sites like these.

I work in a web development role in an IT services division at a University in New Zealand and we've been plogging in this very way for around two and half years now. We began using a couple of copies of Radio Userland with one machine syndicating the output of another and pushing the merged content out to our team intranet site, but as more team members got the blog-bug we moved onto MovableType (MT) which we still run now.

Blogging is now an essential part of our team and project management culture. We create seperate blogs for different projects, we setup, host and skin blogs for other teams and projects around campus, and still maintain a core blog for our own webteam which we use as a kind of change-control notification point and issues register.

After a couple of years of use the corpus of blog posts and articles has become a knowledge-base for our teams and projects and a great resource to search against, kind of a common shared Inbox. No more searching through Outlook public-folders or file-systems for some obscure note you made a year ago.

We've recently begun using the XML-RPC interface to MT to make automated remote posts into various blogs from cron jobs or watcher scripts running on web or application servers to let us know when certain events have happened (e.g. performance issues, resource use, change control events/migrations).

Although we dont allow non-authenticated publishing into our blogs we do use category archiving in MT to render certain posts out to locations that are publically available or less restrictive so other interested parties (e.g. pointy-haired types) can get a handle on project progress etc.

It used to take a little evangelising till people saw past a blog as being nothing more than a personal publishing tool, but the culture is now well established and ideas for other uses of the blog facilty pop up regularly.

One feature that's hardly ever used tho (which kinda suprised me) is commenting. I'd say fewer that 5% of posts are ever commented on, the blog tends to be a snapshot in time on a specific subject and further discussion often goes on through email or in project meetings between interested parties following which someone will often make a followup (ie new) post. This sounds a little unstructured but it makes for easier reading than your classic heirachichal threaded discussion which tends to drift out of context.

Despite the articles mention of the issue 'blogorrhea' we've found exactly the opposite in that the volume of pesky emails in the Inbox is now a fraction of what it used to be. We're now disciplined enough to browse blogs of relevance to us for posts by others regarding projects we may be involved with.

I attended the O'Reilly OpenSource convention in 2002 and sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on blogging while I was there (company included Rael Dornfest and Ben and Mena Trott). At one point during the discussion I asked who else was using their blog for this project management purpose and noone was, pretty much everyone was publishing a personal blog or building a blogging mechanism.

I work in a web development role in an IT services division at a University in New Zealand and we've been plogging in this very way for around two and half years now. We began using a couple of copies of Radio Userland with one machine syndicating the output of another and pushing the merged content out to our team intranet site, but as more team members got the blog-bug we moved onto MovableType (MT) which we still run now.

Blogging is now an essential part of our team and project management culture. We create seperate blogs for different projects, we setup, host and skin blogs for other teams and projects around campus, and still maintain a core blog for our own webteam which we use as a kind of change-control notification point and issues register.

After a couple of years of use the corpus of blog posts and articles has become a knowledge-base for our teams and projects and a great resource to search against, kind of a common shared Inbox. No more searching through Outlook public-folders or file-systems for some obscure note you made a year ago.

We've recently begun using the XML-RPC interface to MT to make automated remote posts into various blogs from cron jobs or watcher scripts running on web or application servers to let us know when certain events have happened (e.g. performance issues, resource use, change control events/migrations).

Although we dont allow non-authenticated publishing into our blogs we do use category archiving in MT to render certain posts out to locations that are publically available or less restrictive so other interested parties (e.g. pointy-haired types) can get a handle on project progress etc.

It used to take a little evangelising till people saw past a blog as being nothing more than a personal publishing tool, but the culture is now well established and ideas for other uses of the blog facilty pop up regularly.

One feature that's hardly ever used tho (which kinda suprised me) is commenting. I'd say fewer that 5% of posts are ever commented on, the blog tends to be a snapshot in time on a specific subject and further discussion often goes on through email or in project meetings between interested parties following which someone will often make a followup (ie new) post. This sounds a little unstructured but it makes for easier reading than your classic heirachichal threaded discussion which tends to drift out of context.

Despite the articles mention of the issue 'blogorrhea' we've found exactly the opposite in that the volume of pesky emails in the Inbox is now a fraction of what it used to be. We're now disciplined enough to browse blogs of relevance to us for posts by others regarding projects we may be involved with.

I attended the O'Reilly OpenSource convention in 2002 and sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on blogging while I was there (company included Rael Dornfest and Ben and Mena Trott). At one point during the discussion I asked who else was using their blog for this project management purpose and noone was, pretty much everyone was publishing a personal blog or building a blogging mechanism.

Anyone who cares to chime in and let Six Apart know how they feel should both weigh in vie Trackbacks to Mena's post on http://sixapart.com/corner/ and chime in at the support forums and http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?s=73e 99f66b1894f2bafe8c17f192d13d6&act=ST&f=11&t=40800& st=32&#entry182353 in particular.

The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade.

Movable Type 3.0 will be a free download and upgrade.

- Derek

Or you could download it from the source.

"You may install the Software on only one (1) computer or server having a single CPU."

Who came up with that one?? I'd wager that the vast vast majority of hosting clients have no clue how many CPU's the server their website is running on has, while a very large number of hosting providers use multi-CPU servers.

That clause is basically setting up thousands and thousands of people to break the license agreement they agreed to without even knowing it.

The only reason I can see for that clause, other than pure oversight on the behalf of Six Apart, is they want to push people using MT to their own hosting service(TypePad).

License is: PERSONAL, NON-COMMERCIAL USE LICENSE Revised 6/01/2003

If you're comfy with Perl and want to hack extensively, MT is the natural choice. You can make it do damned near anything you want without hacking, of course (via plugins), but sometimes it's fun to mess around under the hood. Oh, and you can avoid the comment-spam problems you mentioned via a number of plugins.

If you prefer PHP, I'd say try Mambo (with a nice polling function built in) or Wordpress (which gets props because it produces valid XHTML/CSS and is clean, clean, clean on the admin interface.

Best advice: go to Open Source CMS and play around. They have default installs of a lot of CMS/blogging systems, and even let you play with the admin interfaces. Very helpful, all in all.

Mandatory plug for my MT-based weblog, here.

I would call the "pixellated" retro look exemplified by k10k boxy. That look seems to be very in in web design right now. I see a lot of sites using the combination of straight lines and tiny text (example 1, example 2).

It's easy to see why the boxy look has become so popular: it's simple to build an attractive, professional-looking site in this style using free or default templates. HTML and CSS naturally lend themselves to boxy interfaces. Building a site that uses a lot of curved shapes in its design is harder and can look like crap if you don't know what you're doing.

I think what this article really ignores is: this is how information generally spreads, regardless of medium. An idea is not going to receive widespread attention until someone with either 1) power or 2) wide exposure takes notice and makes an issue of it.

The link-aggregating blogs, like Metafilter, Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, /., etc. provide the clout and exposure that these little blogs/sites lack. All the little sites have to do is gain the interest of the aggregators and they should get noticed.

There's already a way to track the propagation of an idea across multiple blogs, developed by MovableType called TrackBack.

TrackBack-enabled blogging systems will generate a TrackBack URL. When a blogger links to/writes about a story on another blog, they can "pingback" the TrackBack URL of the "parent" blog entry. These pingbacks are aggregated by the originator and can allow visitors to see who's linking to the post they're reading and what those linkers are saying.

Of course, all of this depends on the secondary linkers being dedicated TrackBackers...

If you have a blog, I'd recommend looking into TrackBack.

I think what this article really ignores is: this is how information generally spreads, regardless of medium. An idea is not going to receive widespread attention until someone with either 1) power or 2) wide exposure takes notice and makes an issue of it.

The link-aggregating blogs, like Metafilter, Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, /., etc. provide the clout and exposure that these little blogs/sites lack. All the little sites have to do is gain the interest of the aggregators and they should get noticed.

There's already a way to track the propagation of an idea across multiple blogs, developed by MovableType called TrackBack.

TrackBack-enabled blogging systems will generate a TrackBack URL. When a blogger links to/writes about a story on another blog, they can "pingback" the TrackBack URL of the "parent" blog entry. These pingbacks are aggregated by the originator and can allow visitors to see who's linking to the post they're reading and what those linkers are saying.

Of course, all of this depends on the secondary linkers being dedicated TrackBackers...

If you have a blog, I'd recommend looking into TrackBack.

Where is TrackBack on Dell's blog? Dell please enable TrackBack so that ppl. can post comments from their own blogs also.

new open source WYSIWYG Web page creator/editor with FTP facilities

Just when the world finally stopped caring about FrontPage and FrontPage look alikes and started implementing MovableType, pMachine and fully-GPLed WordPress and other content-management system for full blown sites, open source community comes up with something no one gives a fuck anymore, since we've moved on from FrontPage.

Way to go, guys, innovation at its best. So in 5 years can I except a full framework for XML-driven clients (hint: Microsoft OneNote) being a new innovation??

I love MT, but to be fair, it's really called Movable Type. There's even a FAQ about it.

I personally use Movable Type for my web sites. My job site also uses it for project management. I've trained several computer illiterate users on how to use it, and they love it! It includes picture uploading, no HTML entry writing, and extremely powerful layout tools. Heck, if you don't like the way it comes out of the box, the MT web site has some spiffy templates, and more are available on the 'Net.

It may require some work on your end, but almost no work on your parents' end. All you have to do is setup a bookmarklet or a shortcut, and your parents can happily blog all day long.

"As if comment spam were not bad enough, MovableType includes, in its default installation, a CGI script called mt-send-entry.cgi which -- you guessed it! -- can be used to send email anonymously to anyone in the world.

And, no, this is not a merely theoretical issue; it's being actively exploited by spammers." There are more details, including a patch, in the blog posting.

"As if comment spam were not bad enough, MovableType includes, in its default installation, a CGI script called mt-send-entry.cgi which -- you guessed it! -- can be used to send email anonymously to anyone in the world.

And, no, this is not a merely theoretical issue; it's being actively exploited by spammers." There are more details, including a patch, in the blog posting.

Try MT, it is a blog of sorts. I've been using it for a number of weeks now, and know people who've used it for years. Nothing but satisfaction.

Past initial set up, The admin is very easy and clear to use. Adding entries and managing them is simple.

It has plenty of third party support as well. From comment spam plugins to remote management utilities. I know nothing about setting up a database/tables, and with a little coaxing from associates, was able to set it up for the most part, all by my lonesome.

It supports any variety of databases including mysql, requires perl. For more accurate information go to the site.

Movable Type

It is a huge pain in the butt, especially considering that I have not found an easy way to mass delete comments with Movable Type yet...so I have to go to each comment individually and delete them.

This past week alone I cleaned out about 20 spam comments.

Given that I use Movable Type almost every day, I'd love to see an inline spell checker for the browser as well as Thunderbird. I'm sure it would appeal to frequent poster on /. and other forums too.

This doesn't make any sense, to take a small, profitable bit of software (not profitable enough to offset bandwidth charges perhaps but it was making money) and then start giving it away-- this is obviously a move to kill the marketshare of products like Movable Type which has a commercial and non-commercial license and Radio Userland which I think is purely commercial-- so that users will use Google's blogging system in preference to probably AOL Journals, another free system that seeks to wipe-out the marketshare of another popular blogging or "Journal" system, LiveJournal .

I'm not saying that competition is bad-- but history has shown us that anyone giving something away of a class that was previously valued for real money is typically doing it for anti-competitive reasons. It might not be long before something like:

1. Background. In 1998, the United States sued Microsoft, alleging violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2.(1) After trial, the court found Microsoft had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems ("OSs") and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for internet browsers, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer ("IE") browser. The court ordered Microsoft to submit a plan of divestiture that would split the company into an OS business and an applications business, and ordered interim conduct restrictions. Microsoft, 253 F.3d at 45.

1. Background. In 2006, the United States sued Google, alleging violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2.(1) After trial, the court found Google had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for personal content management systems ("blogs") and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for search engines, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its search engine and its journaling ("blog") software. The court ordered Google to submit a plan of divestiture that would split the company into an search engine business and an applications business, and ordered interim conduct restrictions. Google, 253 F.3d at 45.

The collective Internet should reevaluate models like Freenet and make a "weaker," more light-weight distributed peer-to-peer information distribution system-- its weaker because you simply don't need the overhead of hardcore anonymity and privacy because pretty much all of the users will want to be "found" by those reading on the Internet. Google's got enough brains to figure out how to make that searcable so we need not worry about that.

Movable Type is most assuredly not Open Source.

It does not matter for most people's use, but it's still incorrect to say that it is.

</PEDANTIC>

LiveJournal is happily Open Source.

No it doesn't. Once a sale is made, it is final. Reread what you just quoted: the sentence you emphasize applies to the service not the sale.

The guy in the article was trying to use the service of reauthorizing his music (after he deleted his authorization keys by reinstalled his computer from scratch) from a credit card he changed to a Canadian billing address (which Apple makes very clear during the sale cannot be used as a billing address for access to iTMS--not in fine print as the author implies).

Had he done any of the following, he wouldn't have any problems:

1. not deleted his authorization key from his computer by reinstalling from scratch;
2. backed up his hard drive with a tool such as Carbon Copy Cloner (this is very easy because a Powerbook can be mounted in target disk mode or you can back up to a bare 3.5" HD via a Drive Dock)
3. not changed his billing address to Canada; or
4. changes his billing information/credit card to one in the United States (having a friend forward mail, for instance).

Right now Apple uses the "technology" of billing address verification to verify compliance. The agreement is worded such that they have the freedom to use another technology whenever you try to use iTMS service (authorize or deauthorize a computer constitutes a service, listening to music sold to you, by my guess does not). They obviously will use this "technology" as long as they are not allowed to sell iTMS music in Canada.

This article sounded too pat to me. It's obvious from the agreement that iTMS is designed to behave the way it did. The writer seems to have gone to great extremes to find a scenario in which he couldn't listen to his music and is the internet equivalent to buying a CD, having it damaged by movers, and then being "shocked" when the music store he bought it from won't send him a new one. Because of this, I checked out the author's homepage: what do you know, it says he's a vice president of MusicDirect.Com (which seems to be a website making money from referrals to Amazon.Com music downloads)--an unfortunate conflict of interest. (I also noticed that he worked for Microsoft, but I believe this to be a red herring: it was their internet division and he left them during the internet boom.)

BTW, I must complement him on a well done homepage! A wiki and blogger: he's a pretty talented guy--talented enough to have a backup of his hard drive and worldly enough to scam a US-based credit card somewhere, no doubt. :-)

Movable Type is non-free software and I suggest you avoid it entirely. Both of Movable Type's licenses (their personal non-commercial license and their commercial license prohibit distributing the software without written consent. There is also language that tries to restrict what you can do with the software (even though U.S. copyright law doesn't allow placing terms on merely executing the software) and claims agreement to its terms under a click-through agreement (which are not valid everywhere) or by merely installing or using the software.

I suggest one use or make Free Software instead. The FSF and the GNU Project publish information on which licenses are free. I suggest staying away from software licensed under the Creative Commons licenses. They are doing great work but their licenses are not intended for use with software.

Movable Type is non-free software and I suggest you avoid it entirely. Both of Movable Type's licenses (their personal non-commercial license and their commercial license prohibit distributing the software without written consent. There is also language that tries to restrict what you can do with the software (even though U.S. copyright law doesn't allow placing terms on merely executing the software) and claims agreement to its terms under a click-through agreement (which are not valid everywhere) or by merely installing or using the software.

I suggest one use or make Free Software instead. The FSF and the GNU Project publish information on which licenses are free. I suggest staying away from software licensed under the Creative Commons licenses. They are doing great work but their licenses are not intended for use with software.

Update to my previous post:
In the MT Features page they say that PostgreSQL and Oracle support is in the works and in the install documentation they give directions for installing with PostgreSQL (DBD::Pg), it looks like they are still working on Oracle support.
Since they appear to be using the perl database abstraction libraries adding support for another database should just be a matter of translating the database schema used at install time to whatever database you want to use, installing it, and telling MT where to look for the database.
MT is "open source" even if it is not free software or OSI open source.

Update to my previous post:
In the MT Features page they say that PostgreSQL and Oracle support is in the works and in the install documentation they give directions for installing with PostgreSQL (DBD::Pg), it looks like they are still working on Oracle support.
Since they appear to be using the perl database abstraction libraries adding support for another database should just be a matter of translating the database schema used at install time to whatever database you want to use, installing it, and telling MT where to look for the database.
MT is "open source" even if it is not free software or OSI open source.

Movable Type is Six Apart's powerful, customizable publishing system which installs on web servers to enable individuals or organizations to manage and update weblogs, journals, and frequently-updated website content.

...but Creative Commons is a useful license, and it's integration with tools like Movable Type meant that this was pretty inevitable, sadly.

The acronym pretty much sums it up: CMS is a system for managing content. Not necessarily web content, and not necessarily XML. CMSs can be used to store lots of different kinds of content.

MANAGEMENT
A content management system is about managing content in a systematic way. If you examine the premise, it implies a set of procedures for handling content (create, edit, view, delete, and more complex procedures built from these basics) in a systematic, structured way. From these advanced procedures arises the concept of workflow and roles: a writer creates content, an editor edits it, and a publisher decides whether to publish or not.

STRUCTURE
Content is not very usable if it is unstructured. A CMS needs to be able to handle metadata regarding the content. Since XML is a thin wrapper of structure around text, which is one of the most common forms of content, a lot of CMS revolves around XML. Cocoon, though, is not a fully-fledged CMS. It is a very useful tool for taking an XML document and transforming it into a web-viewable format and serving it on the web, and thus can be used as a component of a CMS.

SIZE AND COMPLEXITY
Content management systems are not terribly profitable if they require users to have technical skills in order to manipulate the content. If a system does require a great deal of technical skill to use, then the market for such a system becomes much smaller than the market for a system that allows the average secretary to manipulate content easily. A system easy enough for a secretary also needs to be robust enough to prevent said secretary from damaging the system or performing unauthorized actions. From the CMS developer's point of view, it also needs to scale so that the company is willing to purchase licenses for every secretary, and every other person, in the company.

Making easy-to-use, secure user interfaces to a scalable system that requires structure that is custom-defined for each client company and allows creation of client-defined workflows is generally considered non-trivial. Therefore, most content management systems are developed by companies which hope to sell their system to as many large companies as possible. That's why CMSs are generally large, complex and costly. They involve a high degree of business process re-engineering, similar to ERP or CRM systems.

Exceptions (to the generalization that CMSs are closed-source and high-cost) abound, of course. Zope is perhaps one of the best known open source CMS offerings, and it is scalable, can be made secure, and can have easy-to-use UIs. Making it usable for an organization is still a non-trivial task, though, as a lot of customization goes into it. Which, of course, is how Zope Corp. makes its money -- customization and deployment services.

WEB DEVELOPMENT
You ask "how/if this technology can be leveraged by the average web devloper?" The answer to if is, "Certainly." And here's how: webloggers, for instance, typically use a minimal CMS to make their life easier. Check out Movable Type as an example. For another variation, put together a system with, say, Xindice as the back-end and Cocoon as the presentation service, and add in some easy-to-use XML editor and you have a basic CMS.

"TECHNOLOGY"
In short, there isn't "technology" per se. Instead, there's a problem domain: capturing knowledge, structuring it, subjecting it to validation and other workflows, and then making it easy to retrieve and reuse. Any CMS is just an attempt at an answer to this problem. Certain technologies do tend to fit into the problem domain better than others -- there's a VERY large impedance mismatch between RDBMSs and "documents", though XML and documents go together like ham and cheese. Since XML fits fairly easily into the world of the web, presenting content views as HTML is a common technique.

On the other hand, image

... with a German geek-toys site à la thinkgeek. Since I hadn't the money to build up the logistic part around it, I tried it as a reseller. I found a good (German) affilate program (zanox), that lets me choose products out of the participant's catalogues and get a revenue of 5% of every sold item. Additionally, every participant delivers a couple of banners in every needed format.

I mix the affilate program with amazon stuff, using their reseller program and make the products the content of the site.

Using movabletype and keeping in mind some main ideas of google in mind (search terms in filename and in the header, etc.) I finaly made my site to appear on top in google using some interesting keywords (dialer blocker (a tool to stop troyan horses dialing expensive numbers), div x or mx 700).

Additionally, I show banner ads. I show both, valueclick banners from external sponsors and 'internal' ones (sending the users to products or shops of the affiliate program or even sending them to the bestsellers of my site).

The content based ads are making around 3/4 of the money, the rest is devided in 4/5 of the affiliate banners and 1/5 (only a couple of Euros per month) through valueclick.

All in all, I have around 1500 visitors per month generating around 140.000 hits. It pays the traffic, but not my work (I've to post at least one new product a day).

The most important thing is that I have two other software products (ImagePuzzler and ImageDupe) I can advertise for on my site. Since ImageDupe's website is an often linked site and ImageDupe links back to futuregeek.de I got a little 'google-bonus' from it.

All ads and clicks (even the valueclick's) are tracked using phpAdsNew and 99% of my visitors come from google, the rest is yahoo, lycos and a german meta search engine. Since I don't trust webalizer (especially the search engine identifier), I wrote my own script, that keeps an eye on the referers.

Think:

Real time audio streaming of town meetings, city council, public court hearings. You've got the bandwidth to setup and sustain a few hundred streaming realplayer connections.

Keep a consistent interface. I would suggest a web-based initiative, because you can find content management systems (I use this one, but there's more of them, where you could setup a simple username and password interface to let everyone logon, use web-based email, get local alerts etc.

Think of seeing the pictures of a wanted suspect everywhere in the neighborhood in seconds. Grab a mugshot, scan it in, and boom, thanks to integrating your phone service through this (which, if you don't, you'll look at yourself in 10 years and really kick yourself) the guy won't be able to go anywhere near a residential neighborhood without getting tagged. A phone call (or special ring?) will alert you to an "emergency message" provided via email, instead of having to hear about it through the TV (and all the rigamarole that entails, compared to just sending out an email). Think of weather alerts in this same vein. A blizzard coming and you need to warn the masses?

Keep wireless access points around town. I mean, if its in the city limits and you're going to go, go all the way. That way if their notebook has a wireless card, they can still sit in the restaraunt and eat quietly while surfing the net.

Everyone gets an email address that is not spammed and can only be used for city business and contacts. This is a peculiar idea consider, but it would assure that you would never, ever, get spam from this address. This one you can throw away, but I thought I would throw it in the mix.

Teleconferencing intra-city. With video. Nuff said. (Think X-11 or something. You can push the bandwidth.)

If you integrate your phone service through this line, the shared cost would be more than enough to keep a techie or two onhand for support, a few DNS/Web/FTP servers running, etc etc.

Just a few ideas. There is no way this cannot help your town, and I congratulate you in your efforts. Good luck.

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If you have your own journaling software installed, like MovableType, you don't have to worry about things like this!

That is good and all from your standpoint, being comfortable with HTML an all. However at our org. I needed to provide a way for our PR person to be able to update news pages all on her own.

Moveabletype works great for this (since I'm not a hardcore perl programmer, it was nice to have someone else do that work). I spent a few days building and modifying the page templates and setting up the site. Now all she has to do is login to a page, add a title and main story and click publish. Instantly several pages are updated with the appropriate news information, archives and search links, etc. Very nice since I don't have to waste time getting the information from her each time and create a new page. Great for her, because she can update the news website anytime she gets a press release.

I think Blogger itself is somewhat bland, mostly for the novice/home user wanting to get a voice out. For the professional there are some impressive tools that will save you time (Movabletype or Radio UserLand)

- A non-productive mind is with absolute zero balance.
- AC

Movable Type is indeed excellent weblogging donationware. The folks at Movable Type are great at providing requested features and documenting their software. Installation takes (and I mean this) fewer than 15 minutes, set-up maybe 1/2 hour for even the most non-technical of users.

I would rather run the latest release of Slash and went so far as to even check out chromatic's Running Weblogs with Slash (NB: /.'ers, /. is a weblog) after reading this recent /. story about "Building Online Communities."

My problem though is that Slashcode requires a dedicated server--or one on which you have root acces--to install. I'm sure this gives Slash many advantages, but those of us who can't afford dedicated server solutions can't make use of those advantages. My web host doesn't even allow shell access.

Movable Type (and a few other brands of weblog software) offers people with cheap web-hosting solutions to successfully install high-quality, customizable, open-source weblog software. The couple who run Movable Type produce a quality product. Check them out if you want to run weblog software but don't have a lot of money.

I wonder if the /. crew couldn't be persuaded to come up with a version of Slash that doesn't require a dedicated server . . .

Blogger has been having a lot of troubles lately, if you can find your own web hosting, you may want to consider using the very easy to set-up movable type.

I'm in a class where the teacher is making us post blogs. Not for personal hopes and bitching, but for thoughts on class, questions, and biweekly assignments or mini-reports if you will. Using the nifty free (beer?) movable type software, other classmates and the prof. can leave comments. We've had one assignment and so far, so good.
Look here if curious.

Sometimes I walk into ReadMeDoc.Com and ask - did a tree really have to die for that subject? Not to disparage the writer, but I have to categorize this one under the "DUH" section along with "MacIntosh for Dummies."

Blogging can be learned two ways. Visiting blogs. Its easy, there are tech blogs, there are pundit blogs, there are blogs for dogs and blogs4God. There are even nichy topical blogs, such as how to fix your church's web page.

Then there are a variety of free or next-to-nothing tools to get the job done. For the absolute newbie, there is Blogger.com. Once you've figured it out a bit, you can graduate to MovableType. And if you're really afraid of HTML, you can spend $49 and do it brain dead with Radio Userland. There are also a gazillion of choices inbetween.

The point is, blogging is simple. Its not more difficult than back in 1995 when we all posted our first kitty-kat pictures using notepad or VI. Writing good content for blogs is the hard part.

that I ever learned, I learned at Movable Type's website. They've got a great customizable sytem, and EASY install setup. (I've got my non-techie teacher pers to set it up.) And it is easy to use with all sorts of options...
If Timothy can advertise books on the front page, I can advertise a blog in the posts. ;-)

If you are into rolling your own, then take a look at the Look at mod_auth_mysql Apache module. It's basically .htaccess file kind of access control except the user info is in a MySQL DB. So you can do updates/inerts/whatever on the database via your perl and get close to what you need as far as access control without having to write files in the docroot.

You might not be able to make it fine-grained enough, but if you have a thing where each user (for instance) gets their own directory or something then it might work pretty well for you.

And if you are not into rolling your own anymore, check out Moveable Type.

-B