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 don't get it either. LJ is an open source site, use and make a lot of intresting software and has some fantasticly helpful people on it. Yet for some reason people focus on the little kids whining there.
I like muppets.
The worst thing about these idiot self-actualization blog fanatics is that they don't even understand who uses blogs. Blogs aren't your venue to fame and fortune, and the vast majority of bloggers are perfectly fine with this. They just want to post something that their six friends are into. Sometimes, they just want to say something for themselves, like in a paper journal.
Livejournal is filled with 13 year olds blathering about nothing important. And it's my favorite site on the internets. If it's good enough for jwz...
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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?
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.
It's not the blog-software that is gay. It is the user.
No software in the world can turn random gibberish and pseudo-journalistic attempts into something someone wants to read.
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
Flamebait or not, I thought it was funny. It's not my place to say who should or should not have a blog, but... Just as everyone shouldn't run a "website", I think we can all agree a great many of the "blogs" out there don't contribute a whole lot. Of course, you could say this in reference to ALL CONTENT on the internet as well. These days the internet is a digital playground. Let the kids play.
suck my ping!
70,000 new blogs a day? The terrorists have already won.
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.
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
mod_perl is often a deal breaker
am i the only one that hates blogs?
Yes, you're the only one. No, wait - It's actually a cliched response that appears in the hundreds every single time a story mentioning the word "blog" appears here. Keep on thinking that you're individual though.
all i ever see in google is search results from some moron posting his opinion on whatever it is im searching for.
And that's a blog problem how? Bitch to Google about that if you have a problem with it, or try other search engines. Stomping out legitimate long-tail content because you don't like it is extraordinarily egotistical and selfish.
"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.