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Rolling a New Blog

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What are the choices we face in the midst of an explosive phenomenon?

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email: doc@ssc.com

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Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal

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I managed to catch bits of th

game review's picture

I managed to catch bits of the CNA show, but I didn't see any sites that are not featured here.

I recently had my blog infest

clean hard disk's picture

I recently had my blog infested with junk comments. I downloaded and installed WPBlacklist and it got rid of all of them.

Great post. Well, I actually

sound recorders's picture

Great post. Well, I actually FEEL like most of my life is spent in traffic.

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

FYI with the authorization of Doc, I began a translation in french of that article.

If you speak a bit of french, it could need to be fact checked ?

You could also use meaball->Langue Fran

Redhat HTML directory

Anonymous's picture

The RedHat home directory is /var/www in 7.2, 7.3 and 8. If you upgrade from an earlier version, it'll keep your old config (ie html in /home/httpd, but a new install will put it in /var/www.

Thanks for the great article. I just started my own weblog, and it's suprisingly fun (even if noone is visiting it yet).

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

http://www.xoops.org qualifies on these counts I think, although it could do with some more xml/rss options.

Emacs package BlogMax

Anonymous's picture

Only does static html, i.e. mo user interaction but does it well. Worth checking out.

http://billstclair.com/blogmax/index.html

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

Good article. But where to get hosting? To play with these tools (Blogger excepted) you need a host with LAMP tools. Does anybody know of such a hosting service at a reasonable cost? What kind of bandwidth and storage requirement are realistic for hosting a blog?

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

i dont know about anything called lampost....but if youre looking for a reasonable webhosting...i ABSOLUTELY LOVE
they are a FREE webhosting company,
and they DO NOT put ads on your website at all, 100mb, 15 emails, 2 MY SQL databases...how can you go wrong???
oh yeah, i've had them for about 7 months now, and havent ever had a problem with them yet.
goodluck!!!!

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

Another excellent and inexpensive host is 34sp.com. Their prices are roughly $2 per month. In the nearly two years I have used them for my site, it has only had trouble two or three times, and the server was back up within an hour.

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

Hosting: www.phpwebhosting.com

There website speaks for itself.

Consider Antville

hns's picture

Antville is a new weblog tool that's pretty popular already in its (native) german speaking area. It runs on top of Helma which is a scriptable web framework written in Java. Both come with a totally liberal BSD style license. It runs equally well on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. We are currently serving 150.000+ dynamic pages per day from a dual 500 Mhz P3/Linux box on antville.org. Unfortunately, we had to stop accommodating new weblogs on our server, but you can get the software and test it yourself (requires Java 1.3 or higher). If you do, don't forget to let us know what you think!

Java is not a commodity on Web Servers

Anonymous's picture

Unlike LAMP or CGI Perl based solutions Java is not well suited for the Weblog community, because most cheap domain hosters wont make it very easy for you tu run it.

For example eckes.org is PHP-Nuke powered, and this was so easy to be installed on one of Germanies biggest Web Hosters. It is easy to install and maintain and does not put a big memory pressure on the system. (Well actually it is killing the database, but for now nobody complained :)

--
Bernd 'eckes' Eckenfels

Manila is not a commodity on Web Servers as well

Anonymous's picture

and a lot of people use it.

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

Most of the open source weblog software qualifies the basis characteristics described in the article. If you are looking for input as to what PHP-Nuke replacement to choose, an extended list with specific requirements would be helpful ...

As it stands, I agree with Scott that Drupal might be the best replacement. Drupal's modular design let's you customize the system in a maintainable fashion with no or minimal hacks. The administration interface might be a bit spartan (just like a Linux shell), but it sure is powerful once you get used to it.

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

The Google link numbers you give for MT are particularly impressive when you consider that you are using a misspelling: it's Movable Type with no e ("about 79,500" as of Dec. 4).

Phil Ringnalda

Re: Rolling a New Blog: Open-Source MT needed!

Anonymous's picture

I agree with the sentiment of the Advogado post mentioned above: we need a truly Open Source project to take over from Movable Type. I hate to see all this energy being invested by the weblogging community into software which is the private and exclusive property of the MT founders. Movable Type is ultimately a dead end, because all users are at the mercy of the MT owners' whim, and the possibilities of building business models around the software are foreclosed from the start, by MT's restrictive license terms. I believe that using a closed-source tool runs counter to the open-media principles which weblogging should be all about. The sooner the community realizes this and puts its momentum into a truly free (as in speech) tool, the better.

Most of the open source

siman's picture

Most of the open source weblog software qualifies the basis characteristics described in the article. If you are looking for input as to what PHP-Nuke replacement to choose, an extended list with specific requirements would be helpful ...sexy lingerie As it stands, I agree with Scott that Drupal might be the best replacement. Drupal's modular design let's you customize the system in a maintainable fashion with no or minimal hacks. The administration interface might be a bit spartan (just like a Linux shell), but it sure is powerful once you get used to it.

Re: Rolling a New Blog: Open-Source MT needed!

Anonymous's picture

You want an open source blog software, you write one. All this energy invested by the community? How about the efforts of the MT authors? They wrote it, they can jolly well do whatever they want with it. How the hell are the users at MT's whim? The software runs on your server, and doesn't expire. Bunch of greedy fuckers, what, did you think your one or two lines of patches or bug reports in any way compare to the efforts of the founders?

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

I've been using the original Slashcode (http://www.slashcode.com) to run UseTheSource (http://www.usethesource.com/) for a few years now and although some people argue that it isn't blogware, I beg to differ:

1. Can a user dynamically post to a site?

Yep, Slashcode/UseTheSource allow discussions on any "story"

2. Can an administrator limit who posts to the front page?

Yes, by setting different categories and user groups.

3. Can a user edit in a browser (at a minimum) or another tool of his or her choice?

No, this is done in the Backslash interface.

4. Does it produce RSS feeds?

Yes.

5. Does every post have a permanent URL (or "permalink")?

Yes.

6. Do current posts have unique URLs?

Yes.

7. Can browsers crawl the archives?

Yes.

8. Are the archives stable and safe from rot?

Yes.

John.

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Doc's picture

Thanks, John. Exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for.

One thing I've noticed about sites that use Slashcode, PHP-Nuke or similar systems, is that they don't appear at first glance to be blogs. There isn't a bloggy "look" to them.

Not a good or a bad thing, just an observation.

UseTheSource is a cool blog, BTW. Highly recommended to the rest of ya'll.

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

There's a long thread about exactly this issue on Advogato, with some comments on Drupal and a few other free-software blog engines.

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

There's also LiveJournal, which is quite popular and is open-source.

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

Especially within an organization, I think it's important for ideas to be grown, pruned, etc. I personally find that weblog entries don't support that attitude.

A Wiki, on the other hand, is oriented toward persistent chunks of ideas with lots of intertwingularity.

I tweaked Zope's zwiki engine to have a webloggish front page, to get the best of both worlds (in my opinion). Others have taken other approaches.

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiForCollaborationWare

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiWeblog

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/IntroPage

Re: Rolling a New Blog

Anonymous's picture

Given that Linux Journal is a php shop you might want to look at Drupal, www.drupal.org, a GPL licenced blogging tool complete with a web based news aggregator, comment mechanism and much, much more. It originated in Europe but has an international user and developer base, currently powers www.KernelTrap.org among others and is proven -- AND DOCUMENTED -- to withstand a slashdotting thru a very powerful caching mechanism. It's at version 4 now so it has stood the test of time and evolved nicely.

Good stuff.

Bias Disclaimer: I help out with the project and write some of the documentation.

Scott

Very cool.

scott's picture

I'll give that one a look myself. ;)

Scott

scott@ssc.com

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