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

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.

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. :)

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.

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.