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."

Comments

iBlog

[BWJones]

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....

Re:iBlog

[pvera]

iBlog is only good if you are an occasional blogger. Once you have more than two dozen posts it becomes unmanageable because it is 100% static HTML. This means that if you have 50 articles and you change the template you are forced to upload all 50 articles again, plus supporting files.

What you want is something simple like Wordpress. Wordpress 1.5 already uses the nofollow tag, so you don't have to worry about comments spam. Whoever tries to auto spam you is not going to get any advantage out of it. All you have to do is once a month or so check your list of comments and delete whatever you don't like.

Re:iBlog

[ergo98]

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.

MSN Spaces (of course!)

[srain]

http://spaces.msn.com

You know you love it...

Livejournal?

[Donniedarkness]

Is there anythign wrong with Livejournal? I'm not a big fan of most of the blogs there, but the interface is really easy to use... The article doesn't mention any negatives to 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

Re:Livejournal?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

Re:Livejournal?

[Elwood P Dowd]

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...

pLog / LifeTYpe

[shri]

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.

That is an ego/ecosystem. Sorry ... no single user blogs for me please.

Nanoblogger

[zecg]

Sheer elegance is nanoblogger. Truly minimal, console-friendly and GPL licensed.

On the Internet...

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

Nobody knows if you're a blog.

I've used...

[under_score]

...three methods: plain old html/css, Movable Type, and Blogger. Each has distinct advantages and disadvantages:

• 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.

What about Drupal?

[ultralame]

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

Re:What about Drupal?

[zootm]

I had a lot of spamming problems, and could never get the anti-spam additions to work

Try using this for Drupal, if the problem comes up again, I've been using it for a while and it's excellent.

70k new blogs a day with no content

[bad jerkface]

Is there any software with functionality to make the average blog worth reading?

Complaining about the options

[Kelson]

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?

Re:Complaining about the options

[PeeAitchPee]

You forgot:

3. Enumerated list of the categories of top-level comments

Re:Complaining about the options

[nine-times]

I'd stay away from Movable Type. Well, let me back up and say, put a little time into your choice. You can always migrate to other software, but it probably won't be trouble free, so it's better if you can stick with the same package once you start writing.

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.

Re:MS IIS C# .NET Blogging software ?

[nxtw]

There are a few.

DasBlog
BlogX
tBlogger
.Text

There may be others.

Re:Slashcode?

[Musteval]

Are there any meaningful sites out there that run slashcode?

I can think of one...

70,000 blogs per day?

[Regulus]

100 of which are legit, with the remaining 69900 being computer generated google-rank link-farms....

Write your own if you can

[dindi]

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.

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 ... etc..etc...etc ...

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.

Re:Write your own if you can

[knipknap]

Yeah, I would also like to see the security of the packages analyzed. I run Wordpress, and worked a bit on it's codebase to get it running. What I saw looks quite scary, security was apparently not much considered. For example, they have globals sprinkled all over the place, which makes checking such things real hard. (Also, if somebody has register_globals switched on, it gets *really* hairy.)
Honestly, I don't expect much more from similar other products however.

While the article also rates the product in a category they call "Security and spam-blocking", all products, including Wordpress, are fairly highly rated (MovableType got only 3 out of five). Also, spam and security are barely related, which makes me question the value of that rating even more. I am aware that security can not be rated easily, but overall, the article does not make me too confident that they did any actual security checks.

Re:Slashcode? Yes? SlashGISRS.org?

[Lord Satri]

Are there any meaningful sites out there that run slashcode?

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 /. gets. But we still have 6000 daily hits :-) It's very specific: for the geospatial community out there.

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!

typical iBlog

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Paid support and free software do mix.

[jbn-o]

From the article:

Because it's free, paid support is not available [...]

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.

cmsmatrix.org is where you can check them all out

[SensitiveMale]

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 still think "blog" is a dumb name

[Old Man Kensey]

Awhile ago I posted my opinion that "(we)blog" is a really dumb term; originating in a needlessly confusing coinage and so vague as to be essentially meaning-free at this point. (Apologies to Jorn Barger, but that's how I feel.) Back when the infamous JonKatz posted his grand weblog article on Slashdot, a large minority of the commenters apparently had similar feelings. When I expressed the sentiment on Slashdot earlier this year, I got flamed (though again a significant minority agreed that it's potentially confusing and frankly just sounds dumb). What a difference six years makes, eh?

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.

Poor comparsion...

[kosmosik]

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.

There's much better comparisons out there...

[daVinci1980]

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.

Re:Nobody cares about you

[Ithika]

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.