Slashdot Mirror
Trellix Licenses Blogger
I've never cared for the term
"blog,"
but gee, I can't really argue with the idea of a siteful of short newsy items updated several times a day. And everyone seems to agree
Blogger
is a great way to run your own such site, much better than the
crappy alternatives.
As
Dan Bricklin
says, "I didn't like the idea of Blogger being
lost in the dotCom crash.
Personal web sites were growing and important." So he got his company
Trellix
to license it. Go check out his account
"How The Blogger Deal Happened"
(and/or read the
press release).
I think it's important to note, that just because YOU don't find something important, other people may not feel the same way.
Honestly, I think every ONCE and a while, a few people need to at least TRY to grow a sense of humor.
I have used Blogger, and it is a very tech-relevant web app. It has fueled an entire sector of the internet, by giving people who don't know code a chance to still have a semi-dynamic site. Not everyone wants to learn php/asp/perl/whatever to build a simple site.
Up until a week ago my site (http://www.daggerdesign.com/apt317) was powered by blogger, and still would be if Blogger would do the other things that I want to be able to do. Since I have a special set of needs, I'm coding my own backend in PHP at the moment.
Next time you think of criticizing the content on slashdot, try to remember that you may not be the target audience, and frankly, most of us don't give a flying f*ck what you want to read.
Those that can't do, criticize.
-dag@daggerdesign.com
(yeah, I'm an anonymous coward, I'm not logged in and wanted to rant while it was fresh in my head)
One nice thing about Blogger is they don't encourage all their users to go advertise their product on Slashdot everytime a competitor is mentioned. Everytime anything comes up about weblogs, LJ users are all over it saying why LJ is better, it's truly obnoxious.
It's also worth noting that LiveJournal does let you export your journal to a text file (though comments and current-whatever metadata aren't part of that afaik).
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I have a friend who gave up on Blogger, and switched to LiveJournal, because it wouldn't work all the time. LiveJournal is free, and I believe opensource.
The creator of Livejournal and his team opened up the source a short while ago. So, if you don't want to use Blogger that's fine but if you want to use something or install it yourself or help a project built on perl... check out LJ.
I have been using LJ for over a year now. I have tried Blogger as well. I just didn't like the flow of Blogger and I really missed having comments. Comments and a security model are half the fun of Livejournal.
Livejournal let's you see things like stats pages showing how much the site has grown over time. I wonder why /. never had one of these listed? Or did they?
-Jay
http://fudge.org
Just make sure you have lots of Old Bay, a hammer, and lots of paper towels on hand and you will be fine.
http://fudge.org
Does anyone use Slash etc. for a personal page? I just started one with PHP-Nuke but it's definitly overkill.
--
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
You should all be using LXP. It is available at Command Prompt, Inc. It is a C++ Apache Module that uses persistent PostgreSQL connections. It has direct query methods and XML parsing all built in.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
While I'll agree that PHP Nuke is a hell of a lot easier to set up than Slash, I can't say that I like it. I guess my opinion could be a biased since Nuke forked from Thatware. The PHP Nuke engine is fundamentally flawed... I know, I built it.
Don't discount thatware. I'm still working on it and I'm determined to change the minds of people like you whether Burzi is doing it full time or not.
Well, basically, you set up the service, tell it how to connect to your site, where to put things and it does this everytime you update your information on the blogger site. Works quite well, as it's not that complex but you can edit all the files. So if your site runs PHP or ColdFusion, you can add that sort of stuff into it. The only thing that has to remain the same, is the link to the blogger website.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
mborland writes:
[nice things about Blogger, then]
I've been concerned about the service and its future for some time, not without good reason. The company, Pyra, has itself seen very hard times, and last I knew was down to one employee, its president (evhead). This is largely because they've been unable to figure out how to make this thing make money. And if it's not viable, it will cease to be useful.
Note that this Trellix deal, which is the kind of thing they'd been pursuing last year without success, marks a significant turn for the better. Licensing fees from Trellix will underwrite Blogger's main service, as well as Pyra's development efforts. Pyra has already hired a second employee again.
Personally, I've found stablity and security to be a big problem with this service. It has had major problems with downtime
Major is debatable. There have been a couple of hours-long outages, to be sure, but that happens even with major, well-funded services.
because of the immense scalability it must endure--users * # of posts, with both increasing. Also, from looking at its errors it seems sort of programming-error prone--direct calls to SQL Server thru ODBC, no parameter checking, that sort of thing.
The only "errors" I've encoutnered -- apart from some difficulties with FTP posts way back in 1999, when they were still tweaking the service -- is the log file overflow problem. Evan finally fixed that on all servers last week.
Well, there is an issue with archive indexes. That's still a sore point with some users. But it's not a deal-breaker for most.
And worst of all, it seems to store (though it is an option) people's usernames/passwords to their ISP accounts, making the site a major cracking target. If I were them I'd be very concerned about the liability of holding people's passwords in plaintext in a database.
Note that the SQL server is behind a firewall, and only communicates with the Java Pyra client. There's a security issue there, to be sure, but it's handled here as well as at any e-commerce site. Besides, if you're concerned, you can always put your weblog up on a free service with its own password, or set up (as I can) a password with access only for Blogger. Just as with any security problem, this can be managed.
And though I very much respect the cult that has built around it, without solid answers to the problems of income, operating stability and security, people are setting themselves up for disappointment.
Did you READ the news release?
Sorry to be a sour puss. I do wish Blogger success, but think they have set out a hard road for themselves.
It's April, not February. You're reacting to the last bad news, not the recent good news. Catch up.
Even so, in the end, it's just a simple publishing service. I love using it, and it would be a chore to change over (one reason I haven't), but it wouldn't kill me if it went away.
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lake effect weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
You know what the future likely hold for Blogger and Trellix: either they'll go out of business or they'll get bought by AOL or Microsoft. That's not the place to put anything you care about.
... er, files belong to you, whether you, your ISP, or a webhost run the server. Also, it's easy to transfer Blogger information by using an XML template and then publishing; I'm about to do this myself for more flexibility and an RSS feed.
Trellix has been around quite awhile -- ten years, I think. Maybe they will get bought eventually, but most weblogs have a pretty short lifespan, it seems. It's probably "good enough" for almost everyone.
The kind of freedom you're talking about comes at a price. Not everybody wants to be a programmer.
Note that by posting to Slashdot, you're creating content that allows a business you don't own to make money, and that content is stored on a server you don't control, and it could go away at any time. Likely? Maybe no, but think a moment. There's a difference in complexity, but not in principle.
I think it's better to put personal data on your personal site, with a company you have a paying relationship with, that provides a commodity service. Those companies tend to stay in business, and if they don't, you can always switch to a different one. Yes, you may have to download a PHP script or use a web editor.
Note that Blogger output is on your personal site unless you're using blogspot.com. If Blogger goes away, you won't be able to edit anything in the Blogger app anymore -- but all your ba
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lake effect weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
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).
/. 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.
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
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
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I only went to two Minicons, 85 and 86. In 85 I was too young to drink legally, but through the magic of badge swapping and the fact that I was 6'1-195 I managed to get into the Blog Suite and partake.
In '86 we got into something a lot weirder than Blog. I was still technically too young, but it didn't matter as much then.
Blog is a beverage, a weird kind of booze punch. I had it at MiniCon in '85.
Umm, Blogger isn't funded by any dotcoms either. It used to be from time to time, but it's standing pretty much on it's own (or onEvan's shoulders, as it were).
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
Slashcode needs it's own server - not everyone has that. Blogger is far easier if you just run a small website ... and I don't think the Blogger-code is free anyway.
It's based on democratic principles, and provides some sort of weblog on top of the collaborative writing features.
Well, it's really an alternative to our democratic processes, but to be applied to petition/constitution/laws/rules/novels/newspaper writing.
It's a mix of participative and representative democracy. With it, everyone can propose elements of texts, can moderate up or down, can delegate their moderation to someone else (delegations are transitive, which mean that person can also delegate for that element).
I'm looking for some group of persons willing to install and test drive it: VeniVidiVoti Library
This is great news; Blogger made maintaining a webpage much easier for a lot of people, and it's really opened up the web a lot. Its ease of use gives it a real advantage over the alternatives out there.
Hmmm... I just looked into LiveJournal. Yes, it looks well made, but I cannot find the source to the *server* anywhere... pointers?
INITIALIZE ALL VARIABLES AND EXAMINE ALL QUERY DATA IN PHP!!! ALWAYS!!! THIS GOES FOR ALL CGI!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
It has fueled an entire sector of the internet, by giving people who don't know code a chance to still have a semi-dynamic site. Not everyone wants to learn php/asp/perl/whatever to build a simple site.
There is nothing at all simple about building a dynamic site. Or to respond properly to your assertion, dynamic sites really don't fall into the category of "simple".
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Metafilter 3 / Slashdot 0
I think the time it takes for stories to be posted on the main page is taking longer and longer to the detriment of slashdot as a whole. Then again, mefi could just be a better meta news site...
> I suppose it's better if you like having literally dozens of little files named stuff
.html, .txt, .xml or what have you -- nothing else. Blogger has never "pooped" files anywhere, in my experience.
> like pyra.bak scattered all over your directory. It's really good at pooping files
> everywhere.
Eh? The only files Blogger uploads are the blogs themselves, saved as
It's exceedingly simple to figure out Blogger tags, if you have half a brain and the inclination to go through the really short and simply written documentation, which is easy to find.
http://cheesedip.com
and were would linux be without such advocacy? I promote the site because I also help out with it where I can.
Personally, I prefer LiveJournal over Blogger. It's open source, and not funded by any dot-coms, but by the users!
For an excellent example of a site built around the blogger platform, check out bagledog. It's a rather cool site where people talk about movies, old games, etc.
Where are my GPFs? I WANT MY GPFS!!
Posting on Slashdot can be fun, but it's hardly personal, and I'd rather entertain a few hundred loyal readers every week than fight it out for a couple of lousy Karma points.
For those of us a little more patient and a little less technical Blogger is a perfect way for to create content as we surf the web.
Sure it's not perfect, but when it works it works well. I can post quickly when I discover something worth mentioning, and I have a complete archive on the site.
Whatever the net was, and whatever it will be, Blogger lies somewhere in between...
www.bodymix.net
remixing reality
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?
I spent 4 months of HELL trying to get SLASH to work, and then got turned on to PHP-Nuke by the company which was hosting my SLASH site. I had my PHP-Nuke site up and running in TWO DAYS.
Yeah, there were a few holes which I had to tell the hosting company to patch, but other than that PHP-Nuke is the simplicity and functionality leader for discussion sites. Yeah, it's still a little slow on the scalability front, but Francisco is busy changing that.
If you want to create a news-discussion site, try PHP-Nuke first. You'll like it.
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http://www.msgeek.org/
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.)
- [blah, blah, blah. It's just as meaningful
I'm glad to hear thatware is still devloping... I started my site with thatware, but quickly migrated to phpnuke as it had some specific features I dug...
phpnuke is good for some things... but following the migration pattern can be painful if you customize the code much (which seems like a neccessity)... phpnuke.org has a beta of their 5.x code that looks pretty neat... but I wonder if it'll be painful to migrate too...
Keep up the good work with thatware...
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Visicalc, trellix and his general writings and his opinions are important as software history and his other general writings all have interesting things in them that everyone can learn from.
plus he's a cool guy. /. should think about him as the next interview.
of course i'm biased because he went to my high school and his mom taught me 6th grade science and didn't punish me when i punched that 7th grader out...but that's another thing.
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look here:
http://www.livejournal.com/files/code/
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
Blogger's really a single-thread posting system, not even a threaded discussion or messaging system. The nice thing about it is just how simple it is. Though you can format your output page, it is completely incomparable to an environment like BroadVision and Vignette, which allows for all sorts of extended programming and content management.
Also, Blogger is hardly a product. My personal opinion is that they should have made the code free for installation, and yet continue their service for those that didn't want to/couldn't install the software. That would buy down their scalability problems a bit, give others a chance to hack at their dubious code, and also set up the possibility to sell it as a product into intranets. As a proprietary service, they'll forever be stuck with scalability and security concerns.
Productizing Blogger would also make it available to corporate intranets, which can't/shouldn't really use blogger because its security is so hazy.
I think it's great that it's opened up the publishing aspect of the web to many people; that seems wonderful. But I've been concerned about the service and its future for some time, not without good reason.
The company, Pyra, has itself seen very hard times, and last I knew was down to one employee, its president (evhead). This is largely because they've been unable to figure out how to make this thing make money. And if it's not viable, it will cease to be useful.
Personally, I've found stablity and security to be a big problem with this service. It has had major problems with downtime because of the immense scalability it must endure--users * # of posts, with both increasing. Also, from looking at its errors it seems sort of programming-error prone--direct calls to SQL Server thru ODBC, no parameter checking, that sort of thing. And worst of all, it seems to store (though it is an option) people's usernames/passwords to their ISP accounts, making the site a major cracking target. If I were them I'd be very concerned about the liability of holding people's passwords in plaintext in a database.
And though I very much respect the cult that has built around it, without solid answers to the problems of income, operating stability and security, people are setting themselves up for disappointment.
Sorry to be a sour puss. I do wish Blogger success, but think they have set out a hard road for themselves.
Haven't used it myself.
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
I have been on the look out for just the thing, thanks pal. In Slash you gotta stick to the topic or be moderated down and no one reads your views even though it may be interesting. Most time the topics aren't the one's I am interested with at the moment. In case theri other sites with related but a varied concept do let me know please.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
I read about blogger last week, and also Manilla (http://manila.userland.com/).
Can some with some hands-on experience with these things explain the difference between them and the super-high priced content management systems like Broadvision and Vignette?
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
If ya can't beat 'em, clone 'em.
I think it's better to put personal data on your personal site, with a company you have a paying relationship with, that provides a commodity service. Those companies tend to stay in business, and if they don't, you can always switch to a different one. Yes, you may have to download a PHP script or use a web editor.
I use blogger at mkelley dot net and like how I can set it up to use my existing hosting. It's just FTPs in. Blogger is one, if not the, largest blog communities. Web Techniques Mag is using it as well. Neat stuff.
m.kelley
www.mkelley.net
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
I have more respect for the people making the 'crappy alternatives' than I do the people complaining about them.
(ps. sorry, Choco-man, for not believing you - but I'm very untrusting of people who post in all caps :))
Than what? I tried it before, and I got sick of it, really quick. They were always having server problems, and since I'm not an HTML guru I never could figure out their tags and actually make sense of anything.
:)
Blogger was also horrible at keeping track of archives and I suppose it's better if you like having literally dozens of little files named stuff like pyra.bak scattered all over your directory. It's really good at pooping files everywhere.
You can embed LiveJournal into your own website as well and it's WAY easier to update. All you need to do is go to the website or go here and download a client for your operating system. Yes, there's an OPEN SOURCE Linux client as well. *grin*
As far as Blogger sucking because its source isn't open.. I don't quite get that, but to each his own. Not every closed source project sucks. But for those of you that are concerned, LiveJournal's source code is open source now, and I believe the clients are as well.
There's even a MacOS X client.
>infects house with fleas.
That's not news for nerds. That's not stuff that matters.
Unmuzzled power corrupts, unmuzzledly.