Comments on: Help With Blog Article

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 02:03:52 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 01:05:27 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 22:25:34 +0000

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!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 22:08:42 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 22:06:52 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 20:58:23 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 20:03:21 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:20:29 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:00:39 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 18:29:48 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 16:34:12 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 15:50:45 +0000

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…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 15:44:42 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 15:30:32 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 15:03:52 +0000

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).