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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.
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
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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
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.
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
And it's partially for that reason that I'd advise people to stick with an open source solution. Not for philosophic reasons so much, but because you can make your own changes.
It's not one of those things where open-source advocates talk about the benefits of being able to rewrite sections of your kernel, either. You don't need to be much of a programmer. If you're already writing your own HTML and such, it isn't much of a jump to alter a little PHP here and there.
So if you think you might want to, at some point, dig in a little and customize your weblog, I wouldn't go the closed-source route. I'd basically say that, all things being equal, Wordpress is the way to go. It seems well-supported and feature-rich, and there's a pretty big community behind it. However, try a few out before you commit. OpenSourceCMS gives live demos of both the public and admin sections of both Wordpress and Textpattern, so try them both and make up your own mind. Hell, they're free, so you can even download them, set them up, and try things out.
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).
The hangup for me with most, if not all, of the blogging software is that they have little to no support for alternate databases besides MySQL. As a consultant, I have deployed PostgreSQL in all aspects of my business from bookkeeping and web hosting to home-grown applications. As a result, it's difficult to pick either WordPress, TextPattern, or other blogging software because they rely solely on MySQL as a backend. I don't relish the thought of having to administer several different databases for different purposes ...
I've gone with MovableType for the moment as it provides me with what I need now. If in the future WordPress (or any other solution) has solid database support for PostgreSQL I will be more than willing to switch to it.
NOTE: I know that some individuals have ported WordPress to PostgreSQL albeit with some stability issues and without help from the core developers.
Get your ass to RealMacSoftware and get a real tool: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/ RapidWeaver IS the blog tool that Apple should have in their iLife package. Or, possibly, the one that they WILL have in their iLife package. ;-)