Help With Blog Article

Moveable Type. MT makes it easy to have multiple blogs going off of one install, it has a simple, easy to understand interface and it just looks nice.
Greymatter is good - it's simple to use and makes blogging easy, but if you are a prolific blogger, Greymatter will bog down on you at some point. Most people find that after 300 or so posts, GM tends to seize up.

MT for sure. It is downright the best blogging tool out there, in my opinion, not only for usability, but also for support and features. Ben and Mena Trott have made an amazing Publishing System and I will continue to use it as long as it is continued to be updated and supported.

I'm gonna go with Blogger just because it's the simplest thing in the world. I can use BlogSpot for hosting and there's no CGI or anything to mess around with. For someone who either doesn't have the time or experience to set up the more useful Blog tools, Blogger makes it the simplest thing in the world to share my thoughts with the Internet. :) Evan still hasn't given me a way to create interesting thoughts, however! I guess I'll have to pull that one off myself. And the Blogger API means that there are plenty of programs that allow offline blogging. Bloggar (http://www.bloggar.cjb.net/) is my current program of choice, though I can't say it's the best.

I'm currently using MT and I think it is the most robust, configurable software available. It allows you to do things that can only be done through hacks in blogger, diaryland and the like. So it gets my vote.
I'd like to see you talk first about the link indexing sites like daypop and blogdex. These sites provide an eay way to access the information the blogging world finds most important. If you consider blogging to be the next step in journalism then these sites are like reading the NYT, WSJ and Weekly World News all in one sitting.
Also, I'm interested in what you have to say about the community aspect of the blog, especially in the diaryland and livejournal pages. Groups of people form a lot of blogging groups and post back and forth only to each other's blogs. Why are they choosing this form of communication over speech? Or is it a supplement?
Along these lines, I think comments are an interesting addition to the blogging world too. The ability to immediately and directly respond to someone's thoughts in an open forum is very powerful. It's like making notes in someone's journal or calling into a talk show. I love comments.
I think I'll stop there even though I have plenty more to say. Maybe I'll have to write an article of my own.

Grimey old HTML ;-)
Nah, actually, I just like Blogger's ease of use and also its complexity. Experts can mess around with the template, newbies can use BlogSpot, and so on.

MovableType. Without a doubt. I've tried Blogger - the server was down too often, so I moved over to GreyMatter. I was lucky, I made it to 500 posts, but the blog took way too long to reindex whenever I needed to change a templates. The move to MT was the best thing I could have done. The instructions are so well written you don't have to worry about being server savvy. As long as you can figure out how to do a chmod and you have a server that can support it, it's a fast install. I had it running in 15 minutes. (Not counting time to create templates, etc.) You know the rest of the story since you have used it yourself - it's easy to edit a post, to delete comments, to use. Version 2.0 sounds like it will offer even more amazing things.
As others have mentioned, the other important aspect of weblogs has nothing to do with the software. It's the communities we form. Not even within livejournal and diaryland, but just in general. Looking at blogs you can see the links - you can see the circles. Comments add to that too - for example, Michele (who posted here earlier) wrote a post that moved me. I was able to comment on it this morning, telling her why, offering support. Now I'm going to write a post about it tonight. And it continues on.
Memes & weblogs. That's also a pretty interesting thing to look at…
Avantgo.com to allow people to subscribe via a PDA to your blog, but they only allow 8 subscribers unless you pay a fee. I think that's a mistake, just think how many new AvantGo subscribers one could get …

I write a technews/commentary column for my college's weekly paper (The Maroon News). Here at Colgate University in New York, myself and many of my friends have an extensive blogging community. It has helped out many of us with depression and the like by providing a forum to voice our feelings, and even receive comments of support. In this way, we have all become best friends, and I wouldn't give up my blog for anything!

I'd have to chime in with a vote for MT. The capabilities MT provides as tweakable, stand-alone app really give it the edge over any hosted option. Add to that the fantastic support from the Trott's and you can't lose.

Moveable Type is the ultimate choice as far as I'm concerned. I was looking for a portable or stand-alone blogging software that would allow me to customize the look and feel. In addition to the attractive features of MT (RSS, archiving, customization), their documentation was also a selling point. I know ZERO about setting up a Perl application on a Linux server. MT's docs had me up and running in 15 minutes. Impressive.

GM
Simply becuase it is easy to use, update templates, pages, that sort.
With MT, if the server your website is on does not have certain files MT needs, you have to download it and all the troublesome stuff.
With GM it works on almost anything. I will remain true to Greymatter until I see something better.

A newcomer tool, PHP and MySQL based but up there with the best: Sunlog http://www.sunlog.ch!!!
It's all the craze among the European bloggers and we finally get a localized version too.

BlogApp is quite neat - works with Blogger, but adds spellchecking and other OS X goodness
http://www.webentourage.com/blogapp.php

My favorite blogging tool is BLOGGER. You can find it at http://www.blogger.com/. Check out my Chris Pirillo Fan Site at http://travis_104.blogspot.com/.

I use Blogger, but only because my current host is a hindrance when it comes to anything outside their sphere of influence. When I move to my new host, and my blog to it's own domain, I will be using Moveable Type. It has a lot of promise, and the most feature rich package out of all packages I have found, but a less restrictive License and perhaps even GPL'ing the software, would make it much more friendly to the owner of the new server. Right now the closed source is the only reason I am not 100% sure I can use it.

I use Blogger, but only because my current host is a hindrance when it comes to anything outside their sphere of influence. When I move to my new host, and my blog to it's own domain, I will be using Moveable Type. It has a lot of promise, and the most feature rich package out of all packages I have found, but a less restrictive License and perhaps even GPL'ing the software, would make it much more friendly to the owner of the new server. Right now the closed source is the only reason I am not 100% sure I can use it.

Something should be mentioned about Blogger Pro.

Userland's Radio 8!
It is an amazing tool that reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live skit with the Floor wax that's also a Dessert Topping! Radio as a blogging tool is really starting to hit it's stride, and as a general scripting developent environment it can be used to do just about anything.

I prefer to build my own. I am working on my own little blogging system for my site. There has always been something missing from every one that I have tried. I like the fact that I can customize mine any way that I want and I dont need the useless features that come with the others.
My $0.02

I'm a Zopatista, so I use Zope (zope.org). There is a great content management tool called (creatively enough) Content Management Framework and there is a plug-in for it called Blark. Blark is the actually weblog tool I use, and it's quite nice IMO. It allows you to enter and edit/view your entry and then hold it until you're ready to publish, or you can tell it a particular time to publish. It supports threaded comments as well, though the one thing I wish I could do is allow anonymous users to reply. I'm working on that.
All blog entries are objects and you can treat them as you would any object in programming. This is a Good Thing(tm).

hmm .. i know this is extremely 'late', but i noticed no mention of the blog software i use … b2 [ at http://b2.dayzero.org ] .. it's one o' them php/mysql types, but it works very well, very quick to install, and you can either use it as is (yuk) or place it inside your own template. and the support for it is excellent. not exactly newbie software, tho.
zac

I use and love Tinderbox, which has just come out [http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/. I've been betatesting it for a few months now and there's no way I'll go back to a server-side tool. Tinderbox sits on my computer and I basically keep all my notes and ideas in it, and some images and other bits and pieces to. I can organise them visually on a map, add pictures, colours, link stuff together, make a hierarchical overview if I want, and export the notes I want to html to keep my blog and other bits of my site up to date. I *LOVE* that it keeps some bits of my work private for me and others can be published. I'm working on a PhD and so I write a lot of stuff that needs to be published various places, or used in lectures. So I use Tinderbox as my starting point for blogging, for researching and structuring and starting to write an article, for preparing lecture notes, for planning and writing bits of my dissertation as well as for collecting, sorting and connecting loose ideas.

I like wiki because (a) it encourages generating bushes of related thoughts, and (b) those thoughts don't slide into the sunset behind your blogbits.
I modified the Zope-based Zwiki engine to allow me to blog within my wiki, and have an integrated view of blogbits vs less-disposable thoughts…

zac, you just reminded me that I got to provide good default templates for b2. ;)
I would love the article to talk about b2 a bit, not only because I coded it, but because it has uncommon features in the logware world (entities>unicodechars conversion, no publishing/rebuilding needed, etc). It's being used by over 220 blogs now.

I fell in love with Blogger five months ago, and I haven't cheated yet. I've toyed with other blogging apps–checked out moveable type and Onclave (evidenced in this moving result from google: http://www.onclave.org/people/children/jeneane_sessum/ … how inspiring)
So far, no other blogging tool measures up to blogger's simplicity and comman-man approach. It's so easy it should be illegal. The 8 steps to successful blogging with Blobger are:
1) Think.
2) Type.
3) Post.
4) Edit post.
5) Publish.
6) View web page.
7) Admire your own brilliance.
8) Get linked to by others doing the exact same thing.
(Somewhere 'get rich' comes into the process, but I'm not sure which number. Might be step 203.)
Last week I happily upgraded to Blogger Pro, not so much for the functionality, of which the most I've used so far is the new “title” feature, but more because I think the folks at Blogger should get something for their talent, their willingness to answer questions, and their advocacy of voice. $30-something a year is a small price to pay.
So Blogger, know that I'm true to you. As long as you treat me right, that is.
-jeneane

I started with Greymatter, a cgi based software that you install right on your own web server, so that you're not dependant on anyone else's up and downtime. I liked that feature, but I didn't have the time to do a lot of the backend coding for functionality I wanted, and the layout section is a little confusing, but I would recommend it for anyone interested in software that they can run on their own server.(http://noahgrey.com/greysoft/)
Currently, I am using Blogger Pro (http://pro.blogger.com) and I am anxiously awaiting all the featured promised to us in the future by Ev.

I've got blogger, moveable type, greymatter, and a livejournal. So far each has its own strengths. I like the quick blogger templates. I hate the complicated greymatter templates. I like the greymatter/moveable type/livejournal comments, I hate that blogger doesn't have any. There are work arounds to almost everything…it just depends on which system you want to work around.

I've had very little luck with Moveable Type. I am currently using Greymatter on a free host- it's working well- I like it. I've not had any luck getting either of these working on a Win2K server. The one that I've been most happy with as far as ease of use and installation has been Pmachine- I would guess that it took less than 10 minutes to get installed and posting. It does require PHP and MySQL though.

BlogApp for OS X is the coolest I've seen on any platform! It has the MOST features…. They newset version (1.1 available to registered users like me) has the ability to choose from a list of 20 of the most recent posts and edit those. It also have a handy edit last post feature. Spell check. Support for any Blogger API (including MT). It will even speak your post back to you. Automatic ping of weblogs.com. Automatically visit your site after publish. It supports multiple weblogs per ID, for folks that have more than one blogger site. It's flat out cool.
http://www.webentourage.com/blogapp.php

I use Greymatter for my personal 'blog because of its simple, direct templating system. It's not as flexible as I'd like, but it is generally useful.
I use Zope for my science newslog (http://bc.tensegrity.net) because I wanted the ability to add some intelligence to the individual postings, and track how many times the links are followed, etc.
BTW: I have written a short essay about the uses of blogs at http://jimfl.tensegrity.net/greymatter/archives/00000151.html

I've been using Blogger and I like it, although I'm not really ready to ante up any more of my college money just yet. I'm gonna move to something else (MT/Greymatter) when I get my own domain name/site sometime this year.
For now, it works. Nice and tweakable from newbies to hard-core blogger veterans, and it has *no pop-up ads* to deal with like those other 'free' websites.
- JerDog

I am Radio.Userland newbie and LOVE it. Its browserbased interface is easy to use… I've only been using the program for a very few days and am already learning to extend and expand its capabilities. As far as support goes, I had some trouble configuring the upstream FTP to work with my host, I posted a message on the Radio forum and within 30 minutes had a couple of suggested solutions and a personal email asking for more info from one of the board moderators… how can it get better than that!

I use Radio UserLand v8 and am absolutely thrilled with it, Chris. I was online with my first blog post within five minutes of starting the program installation. Radio is incredibly configurable and flexible. I can post by sending an email message or from my desktop. It also has a feature that aggregates news or blog headlines and lets me link to them very easily on my blog. Radio also includes a great feature with the program license, 20 MB of web hosting for the blog on the Radio servers. Including this was a stroke of genius in their business model.

Jim Flanagan, thank you for the link to your essay on Blogs and Wikis. I agree that content, even in People Magazine , is what makes blogs vital to readers and contributors.
If Chris is to write a counter-point to Dvorak's Blog criticism, tho, he'll need to highlight tools that focus on content and contribution rather than eye-candy and ease of blog maintenance. John D's comments were mostly about content.