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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?"
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.)
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.
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.
My friend uses it.
http://www.blosxom.com/
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
...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
The current Movable Type also supports plugins for local Turing tests. 99% of users don't install them because they don't know to look for them, just as over half the MT sites still have the Melody (default user) account still active or the install directory still executable because they don't read the damned instructions.
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.
Free Ipod here
I want an updates list kinda like the one I had before here: http://www.christopherwu.net/news.php, and I used a now defunct program called newsPHP or nPHP for short. It was easy, allowed me to add a couple entries, and stored all the data in a text datafile which was separated using metatags which a PHP script chopped up and displayed. It was quick, easy, and required no mysql, or any sort of programming experience. Anybody got a suggestion for a barebones update/news itemizer? Please Thanks!
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
I currently have phpBB running on a site. Has anyone ever tried integrating their blogging into something like this? I'd think it could be done easily by creating a special topic where only the administrator can post, then another topic for replies.
Has anyone done this? Is there any problem with it that experienced users can warn about?
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.
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.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
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!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.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
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'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.
I use a small CMS called poseiden. http://wonko.com/poseidon/
It does exactly what I need it to, which is maintain an archive and let me people post comments. GPL too.
No longer maintained, but wonko is like that.
I have been looking for something similar similar to Slashdot or Scoop
:)
I don't see how usimg Slash or Scoop would be a problem, but my experiences in installing them can test your patience. Last time I managed to get Slash going was about 5 years ago, and just recently tried Scoop on WinXP without success. Your milage may vary, but since you can do PERL, HTML and C, you will find it a lot easier. I on the otherhand, am not a code money in anyway at all (well a little fortran anyway).
The closest I have come to finding something reasonably mature, easy to install, is PostNuke. They say it is secure. It is php based, but works similar to Slashdot. Here's an example. PostNuke itself has no smiles (I can;t stand them myself), but it has a module called PNphpBB which makes it act like phpBB2. PostNuke's own forum uses this module, which I find odd, but if it meets their needs, who am I to complain
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
I wrote all the code that I used to generate pdrap.org in Python, and learned a lot from that.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
As my math teacher always said, KISS.
That's illegal in most states, isn't it?
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.
--
Du Deutsch -> Du gehe Symlink