Moving to Blog-City

One combination free/pay blog site available on the Internet is Blog-City.com. This site runs on a farm of Dell PowerEdge Blade servers, each with six dual-CPU blades running Red Hat Linux 9. Blog-City.com runs Java's JDK 1.4.x underneath BlueDragon (www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon). BlueDragon is the same ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) application that runs MySpace.com. MySpace.com is the fifth largest Web site in the world.

Blog-City offers no static content. It dynamically constructs every page as it is requested by pulling it from a MySQL 4.1.x database that is replicated for both backup and administrative purposes. Blog-City uses MySQL 5.0 for a caching server to speed up access time, and it uses MySQL 4.1.x for all of the access and referrer statistics. These separate database servers keep the load for particular types of access from bogging down other types of access.

For Web service, Apache 1.3.x communicates with BlueDragon through mod_backhand (www.backhand.org/mod_backhand) with a Java library the company wrote and then released back to the community to make sure that the load balancing works properly for the application server. The mod_backhand module load balances only the Web server by default. Blog-City uses additional mini-farms to produce RSS feeds and answer search engine queries. There is also custom software for handling spam, denial-of-service attacks and a bug-tracking system. All in all, Blog-City is an operation that is spread over a number of time zones and multiple continents, just like its users.

Before trying to create a blog in Blog-City, try various URLs in the format of word.blog-city.com to see which ones are already in use (for example, kleekai.blog-city.com). Once you find something you think is available, go to www.blog-city.com (Figure 1) and find the Free Signup box. Enter the name you want to use for your blog in the text box. For the above example, you would enter kleekai. Next, click Submit to open the Create New Blog dialog box (Figure 2) and walk through the rest of the blog creation process.

Figure 1. The Blog-City Home Page

Figure 2. The Blog-City Create New Blog Dialog Box

Go to your blog's URL to log in to your blog for the first time. You also can click through one of the links on the creation page or click one of the links in your confirmation e-mail. When you do, you will see your initial blog page (Figure 3).

Figure 3. The Initial Klee Kai Blog Page

Enter your e-mail address and password in the Login Console text boxes, and then click Login. Once you reach the Main Administration page (Figure 4), bookmark it. This is where you need to go whenever you want to change something on your blog or check your statistics. Much like UNIX, there is often more than one way to get to a particular option through this interface. This article focuses on one path for each.

Figure 4. The Blog-City Main Administration Page

The tabs across the top of this page lead to:

Along the left, what you see depends on whether you have a premium (paid) account or not. The top grouping of links leads to:

Beneath this group on the left are:

There are many more items in the Main Administration page, including:

You'll find additional options related to RSS, posting by e-mail and more by clicking the Settings tab. Also, note the link to your own blog in the upper-left corner. At any time, you can click this link to view your own blog. Clicking through here makes sure that your test views aren't counted among your viewer statistics, which is a nice way to make sure they don't get artificially inflated.