Best Weblogs for Personal Websites?

herrvinny asks: "What is the best weblog script to use on a personal web site? SourceForge and Google show plenty of weblogging systems available, but I just need a simple, powerful solution. Movable Type has been recommended to me, but I've heard of problems with spam, exploits, and comment flooding. I'd like to have a decently good comments section, where visitors can reply to my ramblings and have a fairly large toolset in which to do so, i.e. smilies, some limited HTML (bold, italic, etc). A small Polling plugin would be terrific as well. Which weblogging systems do Slashdot readers use and recommend? Some complexity isn't a problem; I can work in Perl, HTML, C (among other languages) if I need to. Also, what do people think of adapting Slashcode for such purposes?"

Comments

MT

[Tumbleweed]

There are plugins for MT to prevent comment spam & to provide other features, though I don't know of a polling plugin. (registered users & polling are my most-wanted features. MT 3 will have registered users, but I haven't heard if it'll have polling.)

GeekLog

[Vokbain]

I used to use GeekLog for my personal site, and it worked pretty good. I've since moved to a combination of phpBB, and an addon for it called phpBB_Fetch_All.

The advantage of using phpBB is you can easily expand your site into a larger community or something in the future.

There can be only one ...

[lfm_the_couch]

Textpattern, by Dean Allen, is the One True Right and Only Blogware. You can even get in on the development process, since it's in gamma (a damned functional gamma) right now.

Blosxom

[Apreche]

My friend uses it.

http://www.blosxom.com/

pMachine...

[emd]

...is a great simple and free blogging tool. Requires PHP, MySQL and Apache. Supported on Windows, Mac and un*x. Great community support and many hacks and plugins.

Give it a try

Wordpress

[artios]

Wordpress is a really nice option. http://wordpress.org. It does have a nice interface and a very active community. In addition they have some solutions to the problems of comment spamming.

The other nice thing is that they output compliant code.

Re:Wordpress

[WiKKeSH]

I agree 100%.
I maintain a website where non-technical people (who aren't inclined to learn the basics of HTML) have to be able to post news.
Producing standard-compliant code was a big deal for me when choosing WP.
It's also very easy to setup.

I also like that it isnt a phpnuke-clone. :)

MovableType

[Angel 666 2003]

I use movabletype, and it has been a great blogging tool for me. Everything is controlled through templates, so it makes very easy to edit the look and content of your webpages.

In regards to comment spam, i have had some problems with it, but a great plugin that i found called mt-bayesian , which uses a bayesian algorithm to catch spam. on my blog it has worked very well, effectively stopping all the spam that i get and not limiting my users who post to me.

I have not seen any polling plugin, but i do not think it would be to hard to make one (or to find one) The other blogging system that i tried was b2evolution, an open-source php blog. my experience was that it was a lot more work than MT (not just moving files) and that it was oriented much more towards communities - it expected to deal with groups of blogs and interactions between them, unlike MT where each blog is unique. So i would recommend MovableType, but i haven't really tried all the availible options, so i don't know how much my 2c counts.

Re:Movable Type 3 is coming

[Mr. Darl McBride]

If curious, most Movable Type sites (i.e. foo.com/bar) have the MT program at foo.com/bar/mt/mt.cgi -- if they've neglected to lock it down, then Melody is the default user and Nelson is the default password.

If you see a site like this, please let the person running it know before a spammer finds it, because you can use the interface panel to upload files, even cgi. :/

You can find fresh MT sites by searching Google for "powered by movable type" including the quotes, then skipping some random number of thousand hits forward.

If you don't need comment support...

[SpaFF]

Are you really looking at setting up a community with a user database and a full-fledged comment system, or do you just want a personal website? If you just need something to make posting to your personal site easy and searchable, you should try Personal Weblog. The homepage is at http://www.kyne.com.au/~mark/software/weblog.php
It supports RSS feeds, CSS, Mysql, and Postgresql. It is the easiesy way to put blog support into an already designed webpage IMHO.

I use Greymatter...

[Abraxis]

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

From their website:

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.

Good luck!

Re:I use Greymatter...

[mr_jim83]

I've also used Greymatter with good results. As far as I can tell it's the best (as in only) solution if you want commenting but don't have access to (or don't want to use) a database like MySQL.

Depends on what you want to muck around in...

[gregwbrooks]

I currently host MT and Mambo, and have also hosted other weblogs and nuke-type systems. Each has its pros and cons.

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.

Try TikiWiki

[zanel]

Although it's very Wiki oriented, it also has a fairly robust CMS system and blogging features....extremely flexible. I use it on dailyread.com and have had very few difficulties with it. Standard Apache/PHP/MySQL setup. TikiWiki.org

I use Blogger

[timlee]

I've been using Blogger for many years. It's very simple to use but the one thing it lacks is comments. People usually use third party scripts to do commenting but it's really not that hard to write your own if you know a little PHP.

Re:Slashcode

[maol]

You should know better... have a look at the YASS section of slashcode.com (Yet Another Slash Site) and try to find a unique looking site... quite difficult (but not impossible, I agree).
I really like the work this guy (just click through the core styles to select the different CSS stylesheets) has done for Slash in CSS/XHTML.
PS: I'm running the German Slash Site Symlink.