Blog Software Smackdown 294
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."
iBlog (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [utah.edu] 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....
typical iBlog (Score:5, Funny)
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.
The only one with native video ... (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, many people don't care about native video, but if you do, check us out.
Re:iBlog (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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-ta
"Smackdown" (Score:2)
Re:"Smackdown" (Score:2)
Even if you are going to use one of these blogging tools, why limit yourself to the default code. You are the most geeky of the gurus! Hack the crap out of that code. These are in easy php code. Use their work as a building point... and rip out your own version of it.
What the
MSN Spaces (of course!) (Score:3, Funny)
You know you love it...
Re:MSN Spaces (of course!) (Score:2)
I can't even use any HTML tags in comments! How stupid is that? At least Blogger lets me use the <i> tag!
Livejournal? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [xanga.com]
Re:Livejournal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Livejournal? (Score:2)
Re:Livejournal? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Livejournal? (Score:2)
Re:Livejournal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Livejournal? (Score:2)
The services is mentioned early on in the list of hosted services. But the review is of software someone might use for a self-hosted blog, and it seems to me that creating an LJ clone* to power a single person's journal is kind of overkill.
*I'll admit I have no idea what it takes to install the LJ server software. For all I know it could be a 5-minutes install like WordPress, or it might take three days.
Livejournal previews lie. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Livejournal previews lie. (Score:2)
I've posted with a variety of HTML, and the preview looks exactly like my post unless I'm posting a poll or ordinal list.
What are you doing, and what is the result that you're seeing?
Re:Livejournal? (Score:2)
pLog / LifeTYpe (Score:4, Interesting)
That is an ego/ecosystem. Sorry
Re:pLog / LifeTYpe (Score:2)
The idea is pretty simple, which is to have something like slashdot, i.e. a mix between a forum and a weblog. Threaded discussions and all. However, The big idea would be to have it mostly be a private deal-- members only can read/write/discuss.
Re:pLog / LifeTYpe (Score:3, Interesting)
There's probably a more elegant solution, though.
go Drupal (Score:3, Informative)
Drupal does everything you want out of the box, except in order to get different style-sheets for each blog you'd ha
Nanoblogger (Score:5, Informative)
On the Internet... (Score:3, Funny)
What about... (Score:2)
I've used... (Score:5, Informative)
- 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 [haloscan.com]. For pinging blog trackers I use Ping-O-Matic [pingomatic.com]. I don't run any blogs that are super popular, but my Agile Advice [agileadvice.com] 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 [berteigconsulting.com] 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.Plain old HTML (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I've used... (Score:2)
(Score:4, Informative)
Of course you realize that by observing this, on slashdot, you have proven your statement (temporarily?) false...
What about Drupal? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about Drupal? (Score:4, Informative)
Try using this [kerneltrap.org] for Drupal, if the problem comes up again, I've been using it for a while and it's excellent.
Re:What about Drupal? (Score:2)
70k new blogs a day with no content (Score:3, Funny)
Re:70k new blogs a day with no content (Score:2)
Several (Score:2)
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.
Complaining about the options (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
You forgot:
3. Enumerated list of the categories of top-level comments
Re:Complaining about the options (Score:2)
Re:Complaining about the options (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [opensourcecms.com] 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.
70,000 blogs per day? (Score:5, Informative)
Typo. (Score:2, Informative)
Typo [leetsoft.com] 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
Re:Typo. (Score:2)
Write your own if you can (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Write your own if you can (Score:2)
I wrote my own back in college.
I called it MCAWS (My Kick Ass Web Slate). I hated the idea of calling it a journal or diary. Not sure where the deranged term blog came from.
People thought it was neat, had a few readers, but I never got around to plugging in multi-user functionality. (Next on my list of user selectable themes, which was really just going in and putting in some vars based on a cookie)
It's not too terribly difficult to replicate all the functionality found in most blogs
Re:Write your own if you can (Score:2)
ohh yess, the usual feeling
1. I should have just contacted a "Herbal Viagra" shaman and opened a store,
2. should have written a blog software and wait till 3 years before
3. should have started my own porn site
4. should have started a dating service
5. should have done something someone thought
Re:Write your own if you can (Score:4, Informative)
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:Write your own if you can (Score:2)
Re:Write your own if you can (Score:2)
I wrote - if you can - and I meant, if you cared, if you could write one, if you had the time, if you wanted to (random challange, too much time, self entertainment or just learning e.g. php&mysql a fun way)..
Running your own stuff does not mean more insecure, there are millions of virii out for windows not just because there are security problems, but because there is one potentional target on most office and home desks...... a good virii can hit millons of ta
Re:Write your own if you can (Score:3, Insightful)
It worked for me.
A long time ago, I vowed that I wouldn't blog unless I did it on software I'd written myself. I did so mainly because I kept getting hoarse from yelling "It's just text and angle brackets" at every breathless article I read about content management systems and this was my own personal extended-middle-finger toward the whole web-hype industry.
And over all these years, I've kept my vow. I still don't blog.
Re:Write your own if you can (Score:2)
An other thing I might implement later, is to upload full html, and I haven't seen it in other softwares
I mean if I want to use an editor to make the html and just upload it
Re:Write your own if you can (Score:2)
Wow
Must be my english, but I am not familiar with the expression "ASSHAT", where I came from there is no such device being used for our bottom parts.
On the other hand if reinventing the weel was not sometimes the right choice and done by many serious and respected programmers or big corporations, probably you would be typing that on
Re:Write your own if you can (Score:3, Insightful)
It appears to me that besides liking to be an ass behind an "anonymous" you are quite familiar with wheels, well tires.
Actually some people reinvented the tire with quite a success and many times, just because someone or something was constantly puncturing it.
There came the tubeless, the self inflating tire solutions, and finally some people started hacking their tires and there came a solution of multiple inner tubes or multiple inner tub
Serendipity (Score:2)
Re:Serendipity (Score:2)
Although, even if it _required_ MySQL, I'd still think about using Serendipity. It's a pretty nice piece of work.
The real question is, (Score:2)
I mean TRUE FREE SPEECH, no matter who it offends?
You find one that fits that ticket and get back with us.
I like the personal touch... (Score:2)
So basically just links about technology or Hello Kitty.
Blog? Blech ... (Score:2)
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.
e107 easily (Score:2)
http://www.e107.org/ [e107.org]
Re:e107 easily (Score:2)
Are We Blogging? (Score:2)
Paid support and free software do mix. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
cmsmatrix.org is where you can check them all out (Score:4, Informative)
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.
B-B-B-Boring (Score:2)
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
I still think "blog" is a dumb name (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
fame? notoriety? (Score:2)
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.
Re:fame? notoriety? (Score:2)
Re:fame? notoriety? (Score:2)
I like Sparkpod (Score:2)
http://www.sparkpod.com/ [sparkpod.com]
Clean, simple, $25.year
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Death (Score:2)
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 fut
Re:Death (Score:2)
Want to know what your family members are like? Get in a car, plane, boat, whatever and spend the week.
You don't need yuppy-thoughts on the web to find out what your family is like.
Tom
They're all the same. (Score:2)
A great use for RSSOwl (Score:2)
It's all over, people. (Score:2, Insightful)
What about roller? (Score:2)
http://www.rollerweblogger.org/ [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?
Re:What about roller? (Score:2)
MacOSX comes with a java-based blogging system, but it is not roller, but blojsom [sourceforge.net]. Blojsom itself was inspired by the perl/CGI blosxom [blosxom.com].
Re:What about roller? (Score:2)
And I think all of it's users agree that it's not that great. It's one of the weaker Blog products on the market, unfortunately (spoken as user myself). There are some pretty astonishingly bad bugs in it's handling of spam and comment authentication, eg.
Poor comparsion... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Informative)
I think the breakdown there is a lot better than the one listed in the article. YMMV.
stunningly content free (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Moveable Type (Score:2, Informative)
How many real blogs per day? (Score:2)
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
How many die? (Score:3, Insightful)
web logs.... article worthless. (Score:2)
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
Friction good? (Score:2)
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 publis
drupal and monetizing (Score:2)
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)
I get paid to do this stuff, recently. (Score:3, Informative)
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 [agitar.com] 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 [developertesting.com], which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).
Mill Valley Film Festival [mvff.com] 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. [outshine.com]
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 [outshine.com].
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 [sixapart.com], 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 [drupal.org] 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
Re:MS IIS C# .NET Blogging software ? (Score:5, Informative)
DasBlog [shahine.com]
.Text [gotdotnet.com]
BlogX [simplegeek.com]
tBlogger [sourceforge.net]
There may be others.
Re:MS IIS C# .NET Blogging software ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slashcode? (Score:5, Funny)
I can think of one...
Re:Slashcode? (Score:2)
Re:Slashcode? Yes? SlashGISRS.org? (Score:5, Informative)
I'd like to believe so. http://slashgisrs.org/ [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 [slashcode.com] 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!
Re:well? which one? (Score:2)
Re:well? which one? (Score:2)
Re:Nobody cares about you (Score:2)
Re:Nobody cares about you (Score:2)
Re:Nobody cares about you (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [schneier.com], the London Ambulance Service [blogware.com] or evolutionary biology [pharyngula.org], 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.
Re:Nobody cares about you (Score:2)
Re:imho (Score:2, Insightful)