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.
http://spaces.msn.com
You know you love it...
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
Sheer elegance is nanoblogger. Truly minimal, console-friendly and GPL licensed.
Nobody knows if you're a blog.
- 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
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!
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?
DasBlog
.Text
BlogX
tBlogger
There may be others.
I can think of one...
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Is vobbo
Sure, many people don't care about native video, but if you do, check us out.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
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.
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.
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 if Blosxom appeals to you, but you're more of a Python person there is also PyBlosxom.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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.
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
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
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 &
This post reminds me of the good old days when we just got this interthingy. No one had heard of Al Gore yet. We just typed away on our 9600's , which were much better than the old 2400's, by the way. We only had text on a monochrome and we liked it! "Mark-up" wasn't invented yet and when it was, no one knew how to use it. Still don't, I suppose. Anyway, there are too many young people pecking away at keyboards like chickens in a barnyard and giving just about as much information. Speaking of chickens, what are all these cowards? Cowards were yellow backed idiots who wouldn't fight for themselves or anything else. When called out, they'd just disappear. We never knew when they'd come back. Not like a boomerang. You'd always know when they'd come back. Not those USA boomerangs, but the real Austrailian ones. They were real quality....
What were we talking about??
Abe Simpson.
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.
"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.