Slashdot Mirror
Blog Software Smackdown
An anonymous reader writes "With published numbers saying there are approximately 70,000 new blogs being created each day, and the total number of blogs doubling every 5 months, it's no wonder that everyone and their dog is wondering whether to setup their own blog for a chance at fame, or perhaps a book publishing deal. The question then becomes: What software should you use? SitePoint has just published The Blog Software Smackdown which takes a look at Movable Type, WordPress, and Textpattern. Pick one, and take your stab at fame or notoriety."
I'd should put in a plug for iBlog from lifli software. After trying a few blogging software packages over the past three years or so, I have standardized on iBlog for my site. If you run OS X, iBlog is one of the easiest packages out there that allows a fairly decent degree of flexibility. I chose it because of the ease of hosting images from my photography and media files along with the minimal time required to manage and back up the entire database. My time is getting extremely valuable these days and the less time I have to spend managing a blog package, the better.
Interestingly, it is amazing how much traffic and the variety of opportunities that have popped up from posting to a blog. There have been invitations to give talks, queries for visits from folks like Adobe and Apple, requests for images to publish and purchase etc....etc...etc... Additionally, blogs serve as a means for professional contacts to get to know a side of you that never really appears in a professional setting. For instance, a couple of potential investors have found my site and a common dialogue about photography certainly helped smooth early meetings out a bit.
I never would have thought about these possibilities as the blog was originally simply set up to communicate with friends and family. I hate the term, but the "Web 2.0" is starting to fulfill the promise of the Internet back in the late 80's. With a blog, publishing becomes relatively straight forward such as the quirky children's books that I just posted. Granted, the signal to noise ratio is going down with increased blogspace traffic, but search engines have realized where the growth is and will help with that over the next little while. Now if we could just get rid of the spamblogs....
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I looked at that title and said, ok oh cr*p the government is going to regulate blogs like they have been talking about doing. Then doing something I rarely do, I read something other than the headline. I guess we get to keep a modicum of freedom of speech for awile longer.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
http://spaces.msn.com
You know you love it...
They would be better if they would read slashdot all day. Fame is such a small thing.
Does Slashcode count as blog software? Are there any meaningful sites out there that run slashcode?
Just wondering...It seems the number one open source cheerleader can't get it's own open source software to be more widely deployed.
i think we all need to set up a blog to talk about the blogs that are being set up so frequently.
then we can set up blogs that talk about the blogs which talk about the blogs being set up so frequently.
until then, nor myself or my dog will be happy.
-Sj53
And I've also gotta mention Xanga here... I HATE Xanga, but a lot of kids that I know have learn HTML because of it.
EXAMPLE OF WHY I HATE XANGA: http://www.xanga.com/capntomakeithapn
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
anything out there for the non-php/apache crowd ?
Sort of disappointed that they did not consider pLog / Lifetype in their smackdown. I've found that to tbe only really usable multi-user system. It is critical for blogs to evolve into community platforms and not just remain as platforms for individual egos. Imagine starting a blog on a given topic and attracting 5 visitors a day... (isnt that the max for ego blogs?)? Now imagine letting those 5 visitors start their own blogs and attracting 5 more visitors a day.
... no single user blogs for me please.
That is an ego/ecosystem. Sorry
Sheer elegance is nanoblogger. Truly minimal, console-friendly and GPL licensed.
Nobody knows if you're a blog.
Serendipity? It even has a shiny "HTMLarea" option which is WYSIWYG, which is even more 'humane' than this Textile doohickey.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
- POHtml/css: ultimate in flexibility for layout and publishing. Pain in the butt to update and maintain.
- Movable Type: good balance between flexibility, built-in dynamic features and maintainability. Irritating to keep up-to-date for software versions, and a little slow for some of the dynamic features.
- Blogger: easiest to use by far. Nice integrated anti-comment-spam. Not very flexible in comparison.
For comments and trackbacks I use HaloScan. For pinging blog trackers I use Ping-O-Matic. I don't run any blogs that are super popular, but my Agile Advice blog has a good niche following with about 300 hits/day after six months of development. I've used Movable Type as a CMS system for my consulting/training web site too. It is flexible enough that I can make it do what I need for site layout, permanent (non-blog) articles, and the blog features are mostly turned off, except for publishing news items/announcements. I'm not a layout or graphics prodigy so I like the fairly simple default layouts provided by MT.Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
OK. So it's a CMS. But it works great as a blog and is OSS. I have recently switched to it on my server, and it seems to handle everything better than Wordpress (I had a lot of spamming problems, and could never get the anti-spam additions to work). With drupal, I have had no problems with it or any of the modules I have installed. drupal.org
It is alot of work + money to make your own blog(if its a good one at least.) I was wondering how many of these thousands of blogs actually make more money then they lose? Or do the creators only want the fame?
Visit Tevlog
You can't have linear growth and exponential growth at the same time! So is it about 70,000 new ones per day, or is it doubling every five months? Since it can't be both, pick one!
Okay, okay, so it's possible that the number is about 70,000 new/day right NOW, but that'll change very, very soon, so what's the point of even including it?
Is there any software with functionality to make the average blog worth reading?
It's a hand twinkler, you dumbass! And I got a bag of whoopass for you!
im really tired of this blogging fad. there are so many blogs now, that everyone is so busy writing their blog that noone has time to -read- any of them. it seems like everyone now has something so fantastically important to say that they need to have their own site to put it online for the world to behold. give me a break. noone cares what emo cds you bought today.
im glad that google exists, because on the rare cases that someones blog has worth reading information you can sift it out, however, in case you didn't know, google has some evil shit going on that people need to really start paying attention to. anyway, as a quick recap to my opinion -- if you were thinking about starting a blog - dont - noone cares what you have to say. (and yes, before you trolls start coming for me, that includes this message as well.)
Blog software smack downs or comparisons are to be known as "Slogs"
OK, it's early in the discussion (~25 posts right now), but all the top-level comments seem to fall into one of two groups:
1. Not another blog story!
2. Why didn't they write up my personal favorite?
Anyone have any thoughts on the three tools they actually reviewed?
100 of which are legit, with the remaining 69900 being computer generated google-rank link-farms....
I want to live forever, or die trying.
Typo is so far the greatest blogware I've seen. Was a little bit problematic to get running at first on my web host (they didn't have Ruby and Rails installed, had to build them from source), but it has been working like a dream ever since.
It has one really good side, specifically, it doesn't depend on any particular database. I'm using it on sqlite. Few blogwares offer that as an option. (Especially if nobody really reads my blog. =)
Has one annoying side though - relies on AJAX crap for preview when I type articles. Should file a bug report along the lines of "What's wrong with plain old preview-before-post?" one day...
When you run on the same software as 2 zillion others, there will be someone smart to find a hole, than there will be 1.5zillion script kiddies and automated bots trying to exploit that hole ON YOUR SERVER.
... etc..etc...etc ...
I respect Postnuke, PHPBB, Mambo and the rest, but sooner or later some internet shitstorm is going to hit your machine and that might cost you a lot of work, your hosting, money, lost data, upset customers
When talking about your blog, you need something that displays your data, a search function and maybe a calendar. If you write it for yourself, you might not want a fancy editor, and maybe you do not care about a bunch of other things the Ready-to-Run softwares offer.
Besides, in regular CMS systems I usually see very small support for custom keywords, meta tags and description, and linking methods are standardized in a way that is not very good for search engine optimization, and if you want fame, you need traffic. and traffic comes from search engines.
Yes content is king, but some engines still use your meta tags, and care about a list of things most CMS systems (including blogging ones) do not.
It sounds super easy, but when you start doing your own CMS you can easily spend a lot of time and still being nowhere. I am writing my own (not blogging) product oriented community site, and while it is not that big of a challange, it is extremely time consuming.
If you make backups and run on someone else's server you might ignore all that crap, but uf you value your server you might want to use something simple, but something that is not a software 100000s are testing for vulnerabilities...
I know it sounds a little like contra open source, and I do not mean it that way, I am just scared to use some systems that proved to be containing the same old bugs over and over, and then get exploited on a big scale.
Hey, even if no one reads it it's a good mental exercise to write about yourself. You might argue however, that in some cases it's better not to publish it, but that's a different story...
I don't read replies by ACs.
and unless you have any reason to think otherwise you shouldn't be blogging in the first place. It'd be more beneficial for the vast majority of these 70 thousand daily people to read some books and improve themselves as opposed to rotting in self-decay / worthless mental masturbation.
Same goes for posting on Slashdot.
Personally I publish to get information out there for the search engines to index (mainly software development and other computer related info). I've found tons of useful information in other developer blogs, so I might as well do the same. It's also nice to be able to refer people to a blog entry or refer back to it for my own purposes.
#!/
I've been using Serendipity for almost a year and a half, and I love it. I first started using it because it was the only F/OSS blog software that supported Postgres (I refuse to install MySQL on my server), but I quickly grew to love it.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Are there any meaningful sites out there that run slashcode?
/. gets. But we still have 6000 daily hits :-) It's very specific: for the geospatial community out there.
:-)
I'd like to believe so. http://slashgisrs.org/ - we're trying to be pertinent and useful. But since we're less than 2 months old, we don't have the readership
Normally, you can find other slashcode projects there: http://www.slashcode.com/sites.pl but this part of the site is down since the last slash-css update.
slashcode is *hard* to correctly install and setup. But it *is* a great tool once everything runs at a steady state
Cheers!
Animoog.org
which one supports genuine unfettered free speech?
I mean TRUE FREE SPEECH, no matter who it offends?
You find one that fits that ticket and get back with us.
What business is it of yours how I spend my time?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Flamebait? I dont think so, this is a good point. Just because these people can publish that they had a really rotten experience with a hangnail today, should they? This blogospheric crap is like hair in the drain, clogging the search engines with useless crap. BLAHg is more like it.
So basically just links about technology or Hello Kitty.
I've never read more than the first sentence of a blog before turning my attention to something wortwhile.
It's a psychological release for the writer, not actually intended to be read by anyone.
As a rule, people who lead interesting lives don't blog.
Land Down Under (LDU) has always suited my needs for personal blog sites, it's easy to set up, even has a blog edition!
Then write it in a journal. Don't go downtown, take a can of paint and spray paint all of your mundane, boring, random thoughts and daily life notes on the sides of buildings for all the world to see.
Every thing you have doesn't have to end up on the internet. "Blogs" should not make people famous. Blogs should be interesting if the person is already known for something. For instance, I might enjoy reading the insights of a person with some notariety in their chosen medical profession. Becuase they're already interesting.
What little spat Felisha is having at school with her boyfriend and her ex boyfriend and her ex boyfriend'ss new girlfriend or her suicidal poetry and half-assed slutty pics posted to try and garner attention to her blog are not interesting and not worthy of being put on the internet.
Again - not every person needs a daily blog on the internet fo six billion people to read. If you need to work through your thoughts by writing them down - OPEN UP A TEXT EDITOR.
e107 is easy to setup, completely free, has a built-in forum, has a ton of plugins, completely graphical management, and (this is the important part) a large tech support community.
http://www.e107.org/
What about the Slashcode? Now with CSS!
--
make install -not war
I mainly started a blog to force myself to write. It's a good exercise, even if it is repetitive mental masturbation.
My wife, family, and a few friends mainly read my blog, and that's okay.
fotopages.com which as the domain suggests is a foto blog and has some nice features.
Sunday 11/13:
My friend tried again today to get me and help him reload Windows XP on his Taiwanese stamped steel dust bucket , AS IF !! We're going to the mall today to try out something, something big! But you'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out what I am talking about.
Monday 11/14:
I had a big poop today that really hurt. It must have been from eating that 1/4 pound of Grape Nut Vindaloo. It was like launching a rocket, like an old Saturn IV, huge, and firey.
I promised yesterday I had some news for you today. I think my iPod looks best on my new Bill Blass belt. I tried the left side and right side, and while each is bold and different, I think left side, mounted sideways is the look I want! I tried it out for about 1/2 an hour yesterday just walking around the mall and got a lot of looks.
From the article:
Actually, there's nothing stopping anyone from supplying paid support for any GNU General Public Licensed program, including WordPress. And such paid support can be available but not widely enough advertised for most people to know about it. The relationship the author is getting at here is simply not true.
Digital Citizen
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
You can read reviews and scores of over 100 blog types and can even compare up to 10 at a time.
A very handy and thorough site.
I vote we put a smackdown on new blogs which at the current rate of creation will outnumber the species which creates and reads them. I have one. Just one. I swear. I hardly use it. But come on... I know people with three or four. Saying nothing of value four times over... So mostly like the congressional record... Never mind...
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Blog == diary put on the web.
I personally can't stand blogs simply because the vast majority of people lead superficial and annoyingly shallow lives.
"like totally tina said 'pshaw' and I was like no way and she was like 'uh yeah!' and I was totally like 'talk to the hand' and she was like about to burst a tear it was HI-lar-rious!"
I find some developer blogs interesting but that's only because I want to see what PRODUCTIVE shit they're up to [and occasionally there are tidbits of funny shit].
I'm not trying to say people shouldn't put their diaries online [er.... blog]. I'm saying big fucking deal.
Where's the newstory about 1990s geocities webpages? I had one! Am I famous? Do you like me yet? Same shit, different name, different decade.
Didn't care about people then, still don't now.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
And here I was thinking that people blogged for their own amusement.
Maybe I'm just not hip enough, but I think some people might be a bit too cynical and think there must be some profit motive behind every act of the online citizen.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I like Sparkpod
http://www.sparkpod.com/
Clean, simple, $25.year
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Livejournal previews lie. The preview you get is not what your post will look like when it is posted to a blog entry.
Digital Citizen
Wrong. My friends care about me, so they read my blog. I care about them, so I read their blogs. We do chat on the phone sometimes, maybe even a lot. But blogspace is a nice way for all of us to keep up on each others' lives (and all be on the same page) without being forced to dedicate precious phone time to "what I did this week and how it made me feel" three ways.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Here, PolkaDot is simple. No installation. No configuration. Just dump text files and off you go. Now go away kid, yer bothering me.
They forgot DotClear ( http://www.dotclear.net/en/ ). It's really a nice blogging tool, with a lot of plugins (I mean *a lot*) and a lot of available themes.
Give it a try, it worth it !
Ploum.net.
Blogging is the modern digital version of a diary or journal... many people who would not keep one on paper are lured to do it online. This is actually a good thing, because it preserves thoughts and other ideas about a person that might have disappeared otherwise.
The real question is, what happens when a blogger dies? Will someone preserve their blog somewhere for their family/friends to peruse through? Will there be a Library of Blogress where everyone's "published" scribblings are preserved, for future researchers to find and document?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
They all have the same features, the same performance, the same plugins cross-ported to all the blog platforms, and shoddy integration of other cgi programs. None of them can quite keep up with things like referrer spam, although B2Evolution gives it a good shot with a central blacklist. I would like to set up a blog for my family which includes at least a decent gateway to something like webcalendar and coppermine or gallery2. The only package that comes close to this is drupal, but that program tends to get lost in masturbatory taxonomy garbage. It also has a big problem with its architecture getting in the way of usable interfaces. If you don't believe me, try setting up the Event module. When will something new come along? I'm not interested in writing one myself; I don't have the time. I just can't understand why I appear to be the only person who wants a consistent interface across the various sections of a website -- without resorting to the "Kubrick" skin, which appears to have been ported to every program on the planet.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
I like Postnuke! but I have heard good things about Mambo and Drupal.
Please do not email me at ftrotter@uversainc.com since I no longer work there... instead try use the contact form on fredtrotter.com
And yet here you are posting on slashdot...
If you open a blog article in a new window in RSSOwl you can have the RSS feed, the actual article and your blog web app's new entry page open in the same neat little program. I love it, and wish that they'd include real built-in support for Movable Type and Wordpress.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Is vobbo
Sure, many people don't care about native video, but if you do, check us out.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Bring on the Podcast Blogs! And their associated Fame!
----- Concentrate on promoting more than demoting.
Nobody cares about me? thanks for the ego boost. But I would disagree.
Right now I live in China. I have some pretty interesting life experiences, compared to my family and friends in the US. They all love to hear from me, but face it, it's hard to keep in good contact with all my friends and family, all the time. That's where a blog comes in. My 15 friends and family members (who DO care about me!) get to read up about my life in China. In an unobtrusive way, on their time and terms.
I don't plan on getting famous with my blog, I don't plan on changing the world. I just plan on letting people know what's going on with my life. And based on the response I get from people I know, or used to know, it's worthwhile.
So I'm sorry you don't have any friends or family that care. I do.
70,000 new blogs a day? The terrorists have already won.
If I walk downtown and there is some "message" on a sidewall I don't really have a chance not to waste at least a glance. But if some boring person has a blog online sharing his/her trivialities of live chances are quite low that I will actually end up there. I don't really see the problem here.
I don't read replies by ACs.
As far as I know, html/css is the only option if you don't have the ability to install and run anything on the server you have access to. I have a cobbled together perl app that allows me to write posts as text with some minimal markup, and translates it to proper html with links, image scaling and thumbnail creation, rss feed generation and so on, and moves it all up to the server using scp. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to have it indexed by blox indexers, but then, I'm not really writing for a larger audience anyhow so I don't much mind.
m l
To me this is a good compromise - it's lean, easy to manage if there's a problem, and a static page loads real fast - and I've been surprised that there doesn't seem to exist any "real" tools for managing a static webpage-type blog like this.
http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren/log/current.ht
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
No, people who lead interesting lives don't read Slashdot threads.
... Now, back to the adult conversation.
:-)
Nor do they write free software.
For that matter, people who do anything I don't do must be people who don't lead interesting lives.
BOO to anyone who's doing something I don't think is worthwhile!
Like the man said, this thread is for opinions on the software reviewed in the smackdown... NOT for complaining about blogs, or offering tips on other obscure blogging software.
I use WordPress, or at least I'm in the process of switching to WordPress from Blogger. Blogger was great to get my blog up and running quickly, but its feature set is too limited for serious use. WordPress can do just about anything and is great for programming types who like to fiddle with code as well as write. Guilty as charged.
I'll be writing an article about the switch soon. Kaz, be sure to tune in!
I've had my eye on Roller for a long time (I think it is bundled with mac osx too). Is anyone using this?
http://www.rollerweblogger.org/
It took about 5 minutes for me to set up, but I never really got into the blog rythym.
Do the heavy-duty bloggers out there like it?
using a plugin called WPG2 written by Ozgreg, I use Gallery 2 exclusively both as a standalone and embedded in WordPress 1.5.x - works great. looking forward to the upcoming WordPress 1.6 souped up with Ajax. =) i strongly believe that these 2 powerful personal publishing platforms will one day become a standard package to be offered competitively by hosting providers. :)
Gallery - http://gallery.sf.net/
WordPress - http://wordpress.org/
wpg2 plugin - http://wpg2.ozgreg.com/forums/
I've got to put in a word for the best of blogs. BloopDiary is small, but it is by far the best-coded, best-designed webdiary site I've seen (beats the pants off Xanga or LiveJournal). Unfortunately, as it's run by about 3 people, logistics puts an 8000-user cap on it.
At this point I'm hoping blogs will do what portals did (you all remember portal mania, right? No?) -- become so blatantly overused and silly to the point of self-parody that they just dry up and blow away. What used to be "portals" continue to exist; they are known by the more pedestrian but more meaningful name "websites". Here's hoping all these "blogs" will become "journals" and "news" again.
-- Old Man Kensey
Meaning - WTF? This is /. - I need to review blog comparsion for grannies/teens whatever? I review lots of publishing software (and not - not just PHP based, free-as-in-beer stuff). There ale lots of valuable positions - but I mean the comparsion. It is flawed - it just compares ease of use and nice interface, blogging is not about that. Blogging is complicated. I mean I would like to see comparsion of heavy CMS systems that *also* do versioning, publication of *any* file type (photos, flash, movies and shit like that), decent folksonomy, dozens of plugins, easy API etc.
This would be blogging soft for me. But this comparsion is retarded (in my geek head of course). I like power/flexibility/functionality - whatever I do - be it blogging via SSH and VIM, be it PERL or better Python - but let it be flexible and powerful. Not fuckin' retarded.
Stupid comparsion IMHO.
I used the comparison over at asymptotic.net when looking for the blog software for my site. It compares pretty much everything under the sun, in a neat, well defined table with an excellent legend.
I think the breakdown there is a lot better than the one listed in the article. YMMV.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
What little spat Felisha is having at school with her boyfriend and her ex boyfriend and her ex boyfriend'ss new girlfriend or her suicidal poetry and half-assed slutty pics posted to try and garner attention to her blog are not interesting and not worthy of being put on the internet.
I'd say it's all plenty interesting to Felisha's boyfriend, her ex, their common friends and acquintances. And their writings are interesting - even absorbing - to Felisha in turn.
Turn it around: most stuff out on the net is not interesting for more than a small group of people. Your "person with some notariety in their chosen medical profession" is utter snoozorama for the vast majority out there, and is thus no more (and no mess) worthy of being available on the net than Felisha's anxieties.
It's out there for those who want to read it. And if you don't want to (which most people do not) then don't.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
A stunningly content-free article, with a word to ad ratio that rivals Vogue.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
I wrote my own (in c no less, no cgic even, not recommended for anyone not doing it purely for fun).
:P
It features database independence (through an abstraction layer), it is designed to let the webserver do the authenticatication rather than handling it internally (because I use kerberos and sometimes cosign or shibboleth), and it is completely theme-able (all html and css is read in via templates, kinda like slashcode but less ugly
It also features robust group based authorization controls for all functions, that combined with the "authentication system agnostic" design is something I have never found elsewhere (and thus why I felt the need to write my own)
I will someday release the source, once I get around to cleaning it up and making it presentable.
My weblog
My Department's weblog (same software)
Finkployd
I use moveable type at my http://www.quarterlifeliving.com/ blog... I tried WordPress (cause its free) and didn't meet my needs at all. It was way to simple. What I love about movabletype are the plugins, using the BigApi (or something like that, can't remember now) which allows you to modify almost ever UI component. I then using Ajaxify http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/plugin/ajax ify.html to get a AJAX wysiwyg editoring.. Tons of plug-ins come out all the time.. I love it.. Check out all the plug-ins here http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/all.html
I've seen that 70,000 new blogs per day figure, but you really need a filter on top of that to determine the real number of new blogs. Is blogging a phenomenon that millions of users are getting into? Or does it just look that way from the states?
:)
I wrote and ran some software for a while that tracked blog posts by fetching data from ping.blo.gs and analyzing it looking for trends. The biggest trend I found was that most of the pings were spam.
Spam accounted for ~70% of the posts that came through. You can see it on http://www.weblogs.com/. There are probably (by now) millions of blogs on the major blogging services that exist solely as vehicles for spam. It sucks. A fraction of the data that I got was actually real blog posts written by real humans, and only a small fraction of that was useful content.
All that said, I run WordPress and I like it.
Blogs don't have to be publicly viewable. I'm sure many people write completely private entries. If you wander round LiveJournal an awful lot of people post to a select group of friends, ie their blogs are "by invitation only".
You have to go to the effort of loading up a blog in order to reading - hardly comparable to spraying stuff on a wall.
Being a celebrity is hardly a reason to have an interesting blog; being able to write is. The successful blogs belong to people who are interesting writers. Whether they write about their experiences in computer security, the London Ambulance Service or evolutionary biology, it always comes down to content. It takes a lot of skill to write about nothing and make it interesting, so why are you complaining that 14-year-olds don't write interesting blogs? They're probably sub-literate to start with!
Complaining that anything is bad when all you've seen are the very worst examples is misguided and childish. Or flamebait.
the layman's guide to computer science
How many blogs die each day? I'm guessing the number is also quite large...
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
There are several software packages that make the avg blog worth reading. WindowsXp, [your favorite flavor of] Linux, Unix
The key ingredient is the delete key.
If more bloggers learned how to use it, I think the readabilty of blogs would, on average, go up.
As a side note, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-W works in both FireFox and IE6. This may also benefit your average blog experience.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The article fails to address the most important issue of any piece of blogging software:
does it save any time
It seems to talk about all the problems you'll have (spam, configuration, administration, etc), and I appreciate that they skim the fact that having a managed blog means you don't have to deal with this shit.
does it save any time
Much blog software is yet another PHP application complete with image posts, modules and forums, and every bell and whistle, and that is just fine except normal people can't or don't want to use that. They want to be able to publish their thoughts and/or knowledge and not have it take a lot of their time to do so.
Many roll-your-own bloggers I know of spend a great deal of time with link and content spam, adjusting links, dealing with stupid textarea or HTMLArea junk, and heaven forbid they actually post any content.
does it save any time
If not, then I'm sticking to blogging with vi.
I think the current state that blogs (and public wikis as well) are (massively generalizing) pretty much useless shows that sometimes friction is useful.
For a long time people bitched about the publishing companies, saying that they squashed creativity by focussing too much on monetary concerns. Desktop publishing made some things easier, now very easy to make your own zine and publish. But though the friction of self-publishing was radically reduced, it was still too high for most people. Desktop publishing software was expensive, you still had to have paper and pay for it, and need a place and manner of distribution.
Blogs (and wikis) made publishing nearly frictionless. go to some shared blogger site, carve out your space, use some subset of HTML, and you're someplace where everyone in the world can see you. With wikis, you have the wonder of a truly democratic world, where everyone's opinion is just as valid as anyone else's.
Seems to me now, the friction is somewhat valuable. We have a lot of crap out there. Having publishers need to guess salability of books meant a lot of crap never saw the light of day. The majority of people out there either just can't write or have nothing worth reading. You may not have liked all the publisher's choices but a lot of junk got filtered (as was good things that didn't meet their message of course).
It's interesting that a couple of the features they mentioned were spam plug-ins, and one had a feature that posts required a confirmation, both adding friction to the community aspect of the software. Even Wikipedia is looking to add some friction, to make it a little harder to post - coincidentally someone showed me a fight over Rachael Ray's Wikipedia entry this morning, adding sexual statements about her. They could use some friction.
Not saying that we need to go back to the old way. But in the Utopian days of the web, everyone was saying how we'd forever remove all friction and the world would be better for it. Now we see that friction is sometimes useful. It hasn't eliminated the large corporations, just shuffled some around, making new ones. Google understood that in the new frictionless world, people would need new guideposts, making google the new creator of friction (hard for people to trip on your website if its not in first 20 or so google hits). they're all billionaires for it.
When all the 'big boys' blog scripts either had too much fluff or not enough features, I took it upon myself to write my own, learning more in-depth PHP and mysql in the process.
My blogging tool doesn't have features that I'll never use (no plugins or cruft taking up server space) and I don't have to wait for developers to create something that I want in a blogging tool (if I want it, I'll add it..even if it means learning something new).
I sorted out putting Adsense on an older version of Drupal for a friends friends news analysis site. A good CMS and the latest version supports adsense easily.
In TFA, however, I didn't notice any mention of adsense or other - read: Amazon - monetizing methods. (read quick, however, so apologies if that's FUD)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Ever since a year ago, when I was laid off, I've been contracting for companies who need CMS software. I've tried a LOT of them at this point.
Agitar Software uses Movable Type to power their site. It's a corporate site, not really a blog. I added a boatload of PHP statements to the MT templates, so that it would provide i18n (the pages get generated with PHP code in them, then they become dynamic PHP files on the server). Unfortunately, we don't do much with the i18n yet. No matter what you pick, it's in English. But we've got a translation firm on the hook, so that will change. I also work on Developer Testing, which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).
Mill Valley Film Festival uses Drupal. It isn't really bloggy, but on the backend, that's how it works. There are a few "blogs" available (such as "Film Listings"), and the staff add in entries. I also have just started a very basic drupal blog for my daughter's class.
I have a boatload of other blog-like sites I maintain (mostly using Mambo & Joomla), and I've even open-sourced some software to turn phpBB into a blogging system.
So, with some credentials out of the way, here's my impressions.
First, Movable Type is archaic, even with the new 3.2 update. It's great for old-school Web publishing, where the main players know a few HTML tags and dynamic publishing isn't terribly urgent. Yes, MT can do dynamic publishing, but there are other systems that do that waaaaayyy better. So its strength is more along the lines of "update & release, update & release."
It has hard-coded fields, but you can muck around with them (moreso in 3.2). We use those fields for features that don't really tie into the fields anymore. For example, when a user wants to control the URL of an entry, he/she fills out our keywords field. It's just how the solutions have evolved.
I think MT is weakest at looping through entries. The entire scoping system is arbitrary. Some plugins sometimes return global loops, other times narrowly-scoped loops, which can be really not-fun to learn about. Overall, Movable Type seems to me to be a workhorse, reliable, but old and no longer well-devised.
Drupal is very frustrating. The template system is rigid. The PHPTemplate plugin helps. I used it exclusively on mvff.com. But it still requires a huge investment into figuring out how it works. In some cases, I ended up posting support questions and then later answering them myself on drupal.org -- partly because the forums are quiet, and partly because I was pushing the system waaaayy more than the bulk of users do. But what's surprising is that I wasn't doing much. You can see that from mvff.com -- it's just a film Web site. It's not highly sophisticated. If you're going to be building a typical site and the system requires so much tweaking that you become a bleeding-edge pioneer for it, that's a bit much. Drupal is too technical for the average blogger.
What Drupal does well is the plugin system. A default install of Drupal comes with a boatload of plugins. Want forums? Just click a button. Want blogs? Click a button. Want an image gallery? Click a button. For example, with the school blog that I built using Drupal, I went with almost all of the defaults, and it was a lot easier to setup. It took maybe 3 hours from start to finish. It also looks really plain and doesn't do much, however. And I'm still having trouble getting the TinyMCE HTML GUI to work properly on that system. I don't know why yet.
Joomla seems to be the best of both worlds -- a fair balance of tradeoffs on the technical side, but also a backend control pa
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Ok since everyone else is pushing their favorite blog software, I'll push mine. http://www.justjournal.com/
Its an open source java based blog software. I've been working on it for about 3 years on and off in my spare time. The code is not so good, but it works. I just released a windows client that will be GPL'd and the java code is BSD Licensed. The project is also on source forge.
I wrote this because livejournal was very slow at the time it was started. I got sick of waiting for LJ servers and I did't feel like paying.
My current setup is mysql 5 + tomcat 5.5 + apache 2 + freebsd.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I have to plug Scoop as a pain-in-the-ass powerful chunk of mod_perl that I've set up a few times. It apparently is capable of scaling up pretty well, handling the million+ hit days of dailykos.com
Start Running Better Polls
As a bit of an aside here, I'm developing my own photo blog system (see current version in action). Another poster mentions some benefits to rolling your own app, so I thought I would chime in here.
This started as a way to cater to my own needs and desires in a photo management-and-display system. Currently I am my only user, but if anyone else is interested in this effort (either from a development or "i wanna use it too!" standpoint), by all means please get in touch.
-b
myselfmusic
I have a good idea for a mobile device to keep a good blog. It incorporates a few key technologies together for something that is very awesome. I have no idea how to patent something though.
God spoke to me.
Bah. Real programmers write their own. That's what's running on my site (don't give me any slashdot crap about ASP, it's crap but it works). Only took a few hours but it's configurable to the EXTREME!
Sure, many people don't care about native video, but if you do, check us out.
A blog full of videos like this? Count me out.
On the other hand it is more interesting than 99% of any other video blog I've ever seen.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So we were smacking bloggers down? Hello?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
No hierarchical display of replies. Nothing makes me puke than being lured to a blog, only to find out it works with crappy BBCODE in it's default puky blue-green colour scheme, and who is full of stupid out-of-context comments and/or reduntant quotations.
Slashcode has hierarchical display of replies, yes, but is unfortunately written in PERL.
Sung to the tune of "Surfin' Bird" by The Cramps.
"well everybody's agog, about the blog! blog blog blog, the blog is the fog! blog blog blog, the blog is the fog! well everybody's agog, about the blog! blog blog blog, the blog is the fog! everybody's agog, about the blog! blog blog blog, the blog is the fog! everybody's agog, about the blog! blog blog blog, the blog is the fog! don't you know about the blog ? well everybody's agog, about the blog! blog blog blog, the blog is the fog! blog blog blog, the blog is the fog! yeah! well everybody's agog, about the blog!"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Call me old fasioned... Blosxom works pretty well for me... here's a link: http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/
It's php based. Sure, it's a bit old-fasioned and isn't all webby-schmebby, but who cares. I SSH to my server and add entries as I see fit. Yes, there are probably easier, better, more fun and geekerific ways to do it, but that's how I do it.
Also, I started doing what kids today call blogging back in 1994... periodic diary-type entries on my webpage. Looking back, maybe I should've kept copies of it all, but that would've been a pain in the ass without something like Blosxom, which keeps things in tidy little directories. Oh well.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I suppose it is nice to have software to do this stuff for ya... it's like bb forums or some such likeness. But as I have done, so shall I say: Write your OWN software! Write it in modperl! Or php... or flash (though here you'd still want a php/perl handler to submit your vars)! You can do it!
I use Nucleus for my blog - have yet to find a negative for it.
Fantasy Football
Wow! That is a great site.
I already made my choice based on the hardware and software that I had available and I went with Serendipity. It works well for me and it is very easy to use and administer. I did have some trouble with their HTML Nuggets (Custom HTML inside their sections) not displaying the Google search window properly, but I was able to modify some HTML to get around it.
For a simple blog, it works great.
Johnkoerner.com
Actually, the statement was quite clear that the relationship existed "Because it's free". Whether the "free" meant price or some set of freedoms, it's not true. The statement applied to more than just WordPress even though it was in a section of an article concerning WordPress.
But it will be entertaining to watch you prove that absolutely nobody will take money providing any degree of support for WordPress. I expect it will take you some time to exhaustively detail this, so might I suggest starting with the commercial service providers pointed to on WordPress' website just because they seem to be obvious choices for someone looking to pay someone for WordPress service.
It seems like there's a big world of consultants out there and I don't know them all. I'm guessing that there are more than just me who continue to do paid support for a variety of GPL-covered programs.
Digital Citizen
I once evaluated LJ, among TypePad and WordPress, and I decided that LJ was not what my group was looking for because it blocks client-side scripting. We needed client-side scripting.
I was looking for something similar, and I think in the end you're going to end up with either Mambo or Drupal. Mambo has friendlier forums and seems easier to get going, but Drupal is better architected for growth--both of features and of userbase. Both are actively developed. If you have questions about Drupal before you start out or need help installing it, feel free to drop me an email.
Drupal does everything you want out of the box, except in order to get different style-sheets for each blog you'd have to upload the stylesheet yourself and set it as usable--but that's perhaps desirable as a security feature anyway, otherwise your users could be writing their own javascript without oversight.
Hope that helps, and good luck to you no matter what you choose.
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
He goes through all three, calls them blogs.
Walks his way through the smackdown, rates each one and basically says WordpPress wins on points.
For some reason he decides to mention "MultiUser" is somehow important when if you're talking about running an individual Blog, Multiuser wasn't what you wanted in the first place.
Whatever. His personal recommendation is with "TextPattern" and he says he likes it because he really just wants it to publish content. In the words of TextPattern's Author:
"A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs."
Sounds to me like the intent here for TextPattern is a CMS not a Blog, so given that -- was this an article about Blog software? Or an article about his new favorite CMS? My favorite CMS is Expressionengine by PMachine.org, but I'm not going to write an article about Blog software to get folks to pay attention to me so I can make a point about something else I really wanted to talk about.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
seeing as my blog is done with it :) Its from our
friends in the netherlands. Main page is here
*goes to http://www.slashcode.com/sites.pl*
Wow! That's a _LOT_ of sites running slashcode!
Really, that's all I have to say here.
podcast.
I mean, doesn't that make the word "blog" seem so much better?
Works great and supports Postgreqsl if you're of the frame of mind that MySQL have signed up with the devil.
Get the software at
http://www.s9y.org/
And see an example at
http://www.benarty.co.uk/blog/
I want to write about stuff and keep in touch with a few friends. The last thing I want to do is worry about hosting things, upgrading software and dealing with it all going wrong. I chose Livejournal because (a) it's got an RSS reader built in, so I can read what my friends are up to in one place and (b)I don't have to worry about the technical side of things any more than I want to.
My Journal
I am using http://www.s9y.org/ at my Positive News blog at http://www.tiouw.com/serendipity/ (in Dutch so you probably cant read it). And I like it a lot. I thought it was more famous though. So anyone else using this?
yup and of the 30 of a 100 of 70,000 only one gets updated more than 3 times. Seriously, do people really believe that at some point in the near future everybody on the planet will be keeping an online diary (and maintaining it)? Soon microsoft will package some sort of blog tool with new OS's and the blog-fanatics will go crazy proclaiming a million new blogs a day. I predict it will flatten at at somewhere near the number of people who keep a paper diary. What percentage of the global population is that?
I tried a few different packages, but found that full content management software provided the best alternative for http://www.surviveoutsourcing.com/
Whats wrong with HTML editing in Emacs?? Who cares about databases and serverside scripts and such when reading about the blisters you have under your feet anyway, or whatever. Write something interesting and not spend time on howtodoit! It would be like polishing your car put don't afford to fill it with fuel.
I find it interesting that the article selects WordPress for review but laments its inability to do multiple blogs. On the other hand, another popular derivative b2evolution does do multiple blogs and is very similar to WordPress. It was one of the applications that the Linux.Plupii virus targets, but there was a patch available two months before the virus was found.
Sung to the tune of "Surfin' Bird" by The Cramps ... "well everybody's agog, about the blog! blog blog blog, the blog is the fog", etc.
Nice parody, made me chuckle.
The Cramps are a great band, likewise The Ramones -- however, Surfin' Bird was written by The Trashmen --
Link
Link
Link
-kgj
-kgj
I used the comparison over at asymptotic.net
I tried to visit that site: I got closer and closer but never actually got there. Oh, well.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Which means that a good developer can "stand on the shoulder of giants" so to say and raise the standard on one or more simply by contributing to the community. By which I mean that I am in the process of delivering a semi-customized content management system for a small non-profit that I donate programming time to, and at present, the MySQL schema (database definition for the non-technical reader) that I am writing has drawn "coding wisdom" from approximately ten different open-source CMS or BLOG projects. This doesn't begin to count the exponential increase in my own library of coding skills based on looking at how others have implemented similar functionality and then picking and choosing the best techniques to follow.
But the bottom line about open source is that even if I write every line of code myself, when the time comes to release* my stuff back to the community, and then perhaps someone else will "stand on my shoulders" to make whatever I do even better.
(BTW time to release = when I have time to bulletproof and secure the codebase better than I have done so far in terms of the most recent types of attacks and spam abusers).
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
So why did you post this here? You're not famous, so who cares what you think?
Honestly, if it's bad that some people think their posts are interesting, it's far worse when people like you think your posts are interesting, and better than everyone else's, whose posts you think should be banned.
Should this apply to other things too? Should email and chat rooms be censored if they don't get your seal of approval?
I recommend Typo to people willing to get their hands dirty. It's built on Ruby on Rails, uses AJAX, and all the other Web 2.0 goodness could want (tagging is in the works, feeds for everything, yellow fade, blue gradients).
I started using blosxom for Octopodial Chrome several years ago and have been very happy with it. Besides the original perl blosxom, there's PyBlosxom (a port to Python) and my own pre-alpha Lisp Blosxom. This last is a port to Common Lisp; it doesn't work yet, but someday I hope that it'll be pretty nice.
Why didn't the author talk about Community Server? CS is my favorite blogging software, and it's very easy to setup.
My one gripe with blogs is how identical they all are, despite differences in software. Everyone' s doing the same thing. Sure they may be themed differently, but they are all the same. In less than half a second after you take the link, you *know* that site's a blog. You know *exactly* what to expect. What's to make it stand out? You need to be unique. Sure they may "theme" them differently, but they all fit the same box. And however magic the software may be, you're just another blogger.
Write your own software. On my site I had a blog, a wiki, some photo galleries, a few games and other bits of interactive content. Sure, it was a bit hackish, but it was unique. It was true to me. People enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed coding it. They were such impressed. New features would be celebrated. You won't get hacked. You won't get spammed. Both problems with Wordpress and Kwiki. Kwiki especially, and Wordpress were both much slower, bloated (despite any try at modularity), and an absolute mission to theme - i spent oh so long trying to get them to match the existing design of my site. Wordpress - wordpress wanted to infringe on me with its static pages and modules, rather than let itself be part of my site.
You don't need all those features to have fun. The worst thing is having to a make a user, a password, fill in all your details, confirm your address and login just to comment on a blog. If I can't post pseudo-anonymously, I don't on blogs. They don't care for my opinion. I was spammed on both Kwiki and Wordpress. My softwares been fine. The wiki code was ridiculously simple. Just a few lines. But it worked such a treat.
OpenSourceCMS is a good resource as well. With lots of demos to try out.
Community Server rocks! Probably the most powerful blogging platform out there right now for blog communities. I use it on my personal site too and it works great.
I recommend Typo to people willing to get their hands dirty. It's built on Ruby on Rails, uses AJAX, and all the other Web 2.0 goodness could want (tagging is in the works, feeds for everything, yellow fade, blue gradients).
Reminds me of the early days of the WWW, when thousands of web pages were being created per day. Nowadays, it's blogs. How about we follow the pattern and make a new blogger indexer service... "Bloogle," anyone?
A better comparison was at
w ww.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm+blog+compari son&hl=en
.Text, TextPattern, and WordPress.
www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm
Unfortunately the site is down, but you can check the Google cache still
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:Du2NeIh3jzkJ:
The blog breakdown in this article is pretty lame compared to this one, which covers
b2Evolution,bBlog, BLOG:CMS, Blojsom, Blosxom, Expression Engine,MovableType, Nucleus, Pivot, pMachine Pro, Serendipity, SPIP,
One thing to remember is that Drupal, Mambo, ezPublish etc are CMS packages not really blog software.
Excuse me, but: bwahahahahahahaahaaaaa! Do you run a blog at all? All of the major platforms have support nofollow since it was announced, but it does NOT stop spammers. Most of them are just running spambots to place the links. They don't even bother to check for the presence of nofollow.
I've been running Movable Type for several years. I installed the NoFollow plugin when it was released, but noticed no difference. MT-Blacklist was helpful, but after upgrading from 2.661 to 3.2 last weekend (which makes MT-Blacklist irrelevant), the difference is amazing. The newer releases are much better at weeding out spam than the old, but nofollow has little to do with it.
What about Drupal? Or Scoop? Seems to me that plenty of sites have had a lot of success using those packages.
My humble self found that Gallery is kind of slow when invoked though WPG2 plugin, so I went hard way - adjusted theme of my blog to match my Gallery2. Now they look (almost) the same. It was fun adjusting G2 this way, anyway. :-)
"With published numbers saying there are approximately 70,000 new blogs being created each day, and the total number of blogs doubling every 5 months" The math desn't work.
The Trashmen have a reverse-deja-vu effect for me, a slippery jog down memory lanes I've never travelled ... they were a Minneapolis band, I was born in Minneapolis and have lived here my entire life ... granted, I was two years old when The Trashmen did their thing -- I was never plugged into any kind of Trashmen scene, not even a post-Trashmen nostalgia scene -- but I feel like, hell, Minneapolis band, how many Minneapolis bands make their mark? Might as well cheer for the home team.
-kgj