The Weblog Wobble

Published in General on Monday, March 1st, 2004

Trying to decide what to do about which weblog software to use is a pretty hefty decision. If you think that you are going to stick with your weblog for a significant amount of time, you need to do your research.

There are many choices out there, each with their own large user base, so I think it would be safe to assume that they are all pretty good.

This weekend I tried out a few different types on our local server, and while none of them were up and running right "out of the box", I managed to get a couple of them running after some visits to their respective user forums.

WordPress?

In the end I settled on WordPress. I managed to get my urls looking right, to add a few posts and comment on them and do a few other blog like things. When it came down to live server time, however, it seems that a higher force sent me a message. For whatever reason the server wouldn't let me create the directories that I needed for the script.

That was all I needed.

Or go it on my own?

I decided to go it on my own. I only see upside to this decision, aside from the fact that I have to spend time writing the script. I'm using pieces of code from our in-house CMS, and improving upon them and learning as I go.

In addition, what nagged at me about the weblog scripts that I tried was that I had to hack at them to get what I wanted. The idea that I may have to hack each time that I wanted to upgrade... well, you get the idea.

The result

So anyway, here it is, (barely) functional, in need of improvements already, but it should be fun. I'll be spending the next little while making it a little more readable (I hope) and maybe more functional.

For those people who have submitted to the Challenge, don't despair; I will post on that topic tomorrow. I've received some great submissions, and it's been a lot of fun seeing how other people tackle problems.

Comments and Feedback

Just a tester...

One more test. This time, a link.

Proper xhtml please!

hmm.... testing, trying that.

Funny you mention Wordpress. I've been testing it out. Works fine locally, but the mod_rewrite part fails me so far on the live server; maybe it is some server config, or maybe just me. Still need to get it some decent clothes, though.

Sorry about missing out on the challenge. Clients and similar hassles. beh!

Hey Philippe!

I had similar sounding troubles with WordPress and rewrites.

No worries about the challenge, I'll be sure and cook up an IE5 Mac mess for you in the future (btw, you troubleshot a page for me via the css-discuss list with my version of the code from the challenge!).

I am a developer of Absolut Engine news publishing system and there will be loads of new features in new version 1.70 - for example:

  • XHTML code cleaner
  • CSS site style applying to the text edited
  • module functionality (plugins, addons etc.)
  • RTF Import/Export

and much more... I can recommend it ;-)

Thanks for the tip! I'll be setting up another blog for a friend soon, and be sure to check that one out...

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