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May or may not be the best solution for your situation, but I use Greymatter for the news updates on my personal site.

Greymatter is the original opensource weblogging and journal software. With fully-integrated comments, searching, file uploading and image handling, completely customisable output through dozens of templates and variables, multiple author support, and many other features--while having perhaps the simplest installation process and easiest-to-use interface of any program offering this level of functionality--Greymatter permanently raised the bar for weblogging and journaling, and it remains the program of choice for tens of thousands of people around the world.

A while back, I experimented with several CMS packages. PHPNuke and PostNuke weren't appropriate for my needs, so I ruled those out immediately. I tried Grey Matter, and was pleased with its simplicity and flexibility. However, at the time it didn't come with templates (it may now; I don't know), which meant it was really only appropriate for people who wanted to design their website's look and feel from scratch.

Movable Type was next. I liked MT's interface, which was very slick. However, it stored everything in binary files which, in my personal experience, became corrupted easily. Poof, no more blog. (I believe MT now has the ability to store posts in a MySQL database, which would make it easier to backup/restore website content.)

In the end, I (and my users) went with PHPbb. It struck me as the "middle road" choice between GreyMatter and Movable Type. It has a lightweight GUI interface which lets you get in there and work under the hood if you want, or ignore all the techie stuff and just post your stories. Since it's written in PHP, it's also a simple matter to get in there and hack up the code to your liking.

I haven't had any issues or complaints in about a year and a half of running five PHPbb sites. Caveat, though: from what I've heard, installation can be tricky if you don't have root access to your server.

Greymatter seems to be pretty easy to set up and use.

On my main site, I use Greymatter, and I view my control panel log every few days. It gives me who has commented since I last cleared to log, and I have only had a few posts to some "porno4u.nu" stuff, and since I could trace the IP, I added it to my "blocked IP" sites.

Still, my journal does not get a lot of traffic, so my way of working with this is fine. But if I had hudreds of posts a day, then, no. I'd need "anti-spamming" of some kind.

I've only recently started using it, but Greymatter gets the blogging job done quite well if you have the cgi access and small amount of webspace necessary to implement it. It's not quite as fancy as Movable Type and lacks a few features like built-in support for syndication, but I was just looking for a simple, open source, ad-free piece of blogging software and it works for me.

You may also want to checkout Greymatter... it has some cool features and is open source as well. I've seen some nice sites that use it.

I like to think that while the zealots are trying to make themselves heard, the important people are behind the scenes doing the important things. Any loudmouth shouting on behalf of any language should remember that the people who love the language most are working tirelessly to change it for the better. Read Larry Wall's Apocalypses and see if I'm kidding--and pay particular attention to the part where he destroys the regular expression as we know it. :-)

I also like to think that the really hardcore programmers out there aren't wasting their time arguing about what language is superior or whining about what you can do in one environment that you can't in another. Real programmers are too busy getting things working, by any means necessary, within the boundaries of the environment. If you are a true programmer, an environment works as well as you force it to work.

I'm very comfortable in GNU now, Linux, Cygwin, and then some, but it wasn't always so. A few years ago, being a Windows only type and knowing no C or C++, I used to work with Visual Basic a lot. When I found out that Perl worked better for about everything I had been using VB for, I switched. When I couldn't figure out how to do SendKeys or AppActivate using Perl and Win32 API calls, did I spend time griping? No! I wrote an ActiveX DLL, figured out enough C to get COM going, and SWIGged it together.

Slightly more recently, I wrote a parser in Perl to implement a workaround to various shortcomings in Greymatter, but I had to make it work with PHP, in which the entire rest of my site was written (because it's way easier to write a page in PHP than in Perl). Was it any problem? No. For the prototype, I had PHP exec my Perl. Was it messy? Yes! Eventually, when I had the time, I rewrote the parser from top to bottom in PHP.

There's no need to be religious about any of this. If you have the option to use the environment of your choice, by all means, use it! But if you are forced to work outside your boundaries, remember, you are a programmer; you can take it. Plus, the last thing you want to do is take out your frustrations on the masters of the unknown domain.

I write programs all the time that my friends want to try but won't because ActivePerl is 12MB to download. I'm not going to scream at my friends for not having Perl; they just can't use my program. If it's worth my time, I may go to the trouble of rewriting in C++. If it pays enough, I might even spring for Perl2EXE to do the work for me.

It's as simple as that. There's always some solution. You write for your environment. You try to convince your client to deploy programming environment N or virtual machine V on all the workstations; if that's a no go, you do something else that is a go--if that's not practical, you lose the sale.

At this point, I know most of what I need to know to get by in Perl, PHP, JavaScript, C, and C++, and maybe a little VB if I search my memory far enough, and I do virtually all my writing in vim (within which, I admit, I don't know every single command that might be of use to me). If somebody needs me to write something in Python, or Java, or Tcl, or Lisp, or JScript on Windows Scripting Host, or any other wacky thing with which I'm not in constant contact, and makes me do it in Emacs or Pico or even Notepad, damn it, should I back down? Hell, no!

First, I try my obviously overdeveloped shoehorning skills! (It's amazing how many different ways you can find to get incongruous program environments to communicate!) :-D

If that doesn't work, then I owe it to myself to take a serious look at what this environment can do, what it can do right, and what I have to work around. Then, I do my work and move on with my life.

I believe that this is a vital part of what is necessary to be a bona fide Renaissance Programmer, and that most programmers who don't feel the same have no business programming.

That's funny, because GreyMatter is a weblogging software (Much like Slashcode) that is developed by Noah Grey.

http://noahgrey.com/greysoft/

Not to burst the slashdot bubble about weblogging, but if you want to try a really nice weblog, try GreyMatter from www.noahgrey.com.

It's great CGI software!

Check out my weblog (Yes, blatant plug) @ www.oswego.edu/~scooper3/journal/index.html

This is good because it ensures the long-term survival of Blogger. The licensing deal gives Pyra Ltd. the money to continue to maintain (and scale) its servers, upgrade the technology, and possibly work on a more viable business model (like selling Blogger Pro, or finally completing the underlying architecture, the project-management software simply called Pyra).

Meanwhile, the most popular and easiest-to-use weblog-software gets an even bigger audience, through Trellix partners such as About and Tripod. Soon people at those services will have something like a checkbox option to start a blog; won't that be an explosion! This will lead to competitive pressure for other services like Geocities to offer something similar.

For those of you too young to remember, Dan Bricklin of Trellix is one of the original independent software developers, from back in the 1980s. His first major product, Visicalc, basically invented the spreadsheet program concept from scratch. [You can even download an MS-DOS executable!] Maybe someone else would have had the idea of putting a paper spreadsheet on the screen and letting you enter not only numbers but equations, but he was the first, and it revolutionized the PC industry. Later he was responsible for Dan Bricklin's Demo (a quick way to mock-up several screens of potential software for clients, sort of a mix of Powerpoint and Flash in its day -- and still sold as Demo-It!), and then Trellix, which was ahead of its time as a templating engine. Templates are all the rage now, but they weren't an obvious next way to go a few years back.

And basically it shows what kind of a guy Bricklin is; his company could easily have jealously set out to clone Blogger instead, but he saw an existing userbase and brand and also saw a way to redeem karma points (you know, the OLD kind of karma points, the kind that accumulate until you die) by saving a company roughly the way that Lotus (in those days the #2 or #3 commercial software vendor) saved HIS company way back when.

Blogger is certainly limited in some ways. It's dead simple, which makes it easy to set up for your grandma, and it offers online posting from almost anywhere. But it doesn't have discussions (said to be in unreleased Blogger Pro) and it doesn't let you do anything outside the blog format, so you can't use it to manage your entire site. And if you're at /. you may be interested in hacking code anyway. In that case there are certainly alternatives -- LiveJournal and Greymatter among them, and sliding up to the big boys like Slashcode, Zope and PHP Nuke. (There are also the hosted solutions, like Pitas or Dave Winer's Manila, itself the center of an interesting tangential experiment in content-management, Radio.) Those are certainly better for managing a wide-ranging site, and they allow membership and member content creation as well.

I started out with Blogger (I was one of the first users), and though I've been working with a couple of the more comprehensive products behind the scenes, for other purposes, I still do my weblog with Blogger. There's just no reason to change. And now with the Trellix investment, I don't have to worry about Pyra doing the fish-on-the-beach thing.

Just remember that not everyone is interested in -- or capable of -- hacking code just to post their thoughts every day. If you want to play with code, and I have no problem believing that's true of most Slashdotters, Blogger may not be right for you. But it's probably right for a lot of people.
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lake effect weblog

Blogger's ok. Not great - ok. Then again, I was one of the people who got burned a bit when they had massive server problems.

I can't speak for LiveJournal, since I've never used it. After getting burned by a service that didn't actually reside on my server, I got pointed to Greymatter. It's a set of perl scripts (available for free but the creator takes donations) that you install on your own server (bonus) and provide unbelievably configurable output (major bonus) .

It's not for everyone - a lot of the weblogging crowd isn't real interested in the code that creates their pages; in that case, they need to stick with something that won't make them have to worry about the underlying code of their site.

But if, like me, you know exactly how you want your site to look and function, and just need a way to make it easier to craft posts on a daily basis, GM's the way to go. I can't imagine going back to a service whose scripts don't even reside on my own server.

(Not to mention the user interface is quite nice, and doesn't use a ton of frames like Blogger does.)

I like the idea of blogger. And have found that greymatter a better choice. It is built with perl on your server. ( no server modification needed )
The problem that I have with blogger is that you need to give them your FTP password. That makes me more than a little nervous. What if their site is cracked?

1) For people who supposedly would have spent days, if not a week or two, picking up background info and doing research the people who wrote this article don't seem to "get" the very real distinction between weblogs and online journals. Two completely different communities. Fairly small amount of overlap. One is 1995. The other is 1999.

2) Like I said, there aren't very many URLs for an article which is supposedly about weblogging and 'Net stuff. If you look closely, there are more URLs for weblog and diary-keeping tools than there are URLs for actual weblogs and diaries. Is the average Joe Blow reader of Newsweek going to want to take a look at a couple weblogs after reading the article? Probably. Is he going to be ready to immediately start his own weblog or journal? Probably not. D'oh.

3) Although they mention a lot of tools, the one glaring ommission is Noah Grey's GreyMatter. Not only was it created by Noah, who is ostensibly one of the main people featured in the article, it is also pretty much THE premiere tool for people who are serious about weblogging. Again, d'oh!

4) Okay, so Dave Winer is an old-timer on the weblogging scene. So mention him. But devote more quotes to him than almost anyone else in the article? Why? As a friend of Noah's, I'm a little bit biased, but: this whole article could have been devoted almost exclusively to him with a small sidebar of other cool weblogs and journals to check out and it would have been better, tighter, more interesting and given a better picture of the current weblogging community than this hodge-podge of out-dated and inconsequential notes ever will.

5) It's Newsweek. Newsweek is the Lame Stream. Newsweek screws up everything it touches. Newsweek is the Kiss of Death. When your web trend hits Newsweek, your web trend is dead. I hope Noah gets some decent publicity out of this, because I'm expecting that the weblogging scene will be dead or dying off nine months from now.

6) Dear Dave Winer: No, the world would not be a better place if all 6B of us had a weblog. That's B.S. Think about it for a minute and then go and interview a few of your oh-so-interesting cookie-cutter suburban neighbors. Then tell me if you really think each and every one of them should have a weblog.

7) D'oh!