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Geek Culture / Looking for recommendations on blog software

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Gowmars
21
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Joined: 26th Sep 2003
Location: United States
Posted: 11th Jan 2007 03:13 Edited at: 11th Jan 2007 03:21
I am currently running wordpress on my website http://www.thegow.net

But I would like to try something new. Wordpress is okay but I am being told that there is better out there. So I’m curious if you guys have used any good ones and have any recommendations.

I’m looking for something that I can post both personal entries and updates for changes that I make to my other websites.

Thanks

Gowmars

edit: oh and something thats good for posting pictures to go with my entries. I'm gonna look thought some and post what I find, maybe you guys can give me some good feedback on the ones I pick to check out.

UFO
19
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Joined: 11th Oct 2005
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Posted: 11th Jan 2007 22:29
Blogger.com is the best in my opinion. Not surprisingly, Google owns it.

Tinkergirl
21
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Joined: 1st Jul 2003
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 11th Jan 2007 22:37
I use Wordpress (I know that's what you're on at the moment), and I've had no problems with it. In fact, I've known a couple of people move from Blogger to Wordpress.

Nicholas Thompson
20
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Joined: 6th Sep 2004
Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 10:07
AFAIK wordpress is meant to be THE blogging tool for your own site... I personally use the Blog module that comes with the Drupal CMS for my site (along with the path module to make custom URL aliases and PathAuto to generate neat URL's automatically for my blog).

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BatVink
Moderator
21
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Joined: 4th Apr 2003
Location: Gods own County, UK
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 11:37
I'm just setting up Drupal as a collabaration website - Calendar, News, Events, Forum, Blogs. I haven't used Wordpress, but if you are just blogging it looks far more suitable than Drupal.



Nicholas Thompson
20
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Joined: 6th Sep 2004
Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 12:07
Drupal as a standalone Blog isn't great - not a lot of features (like trackbacks, pings, etc)... As an alround developer platform Drupal is fantastic (I run Drupal on my site(s))

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BatVink
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21
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Joined: 4th Apr 2003
Location: Gods own County, UK
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 12:56
Quote: "As an alround developer platform Drupal is fantastic (I run Drupal on my site(s))"


I agree, it looks very good. I see that sites like LinkedIN use it, and it has some good social networking functionality. For an environment where many users are contributing in many different aspects/styles, it would appear to be the best option.

I've also created a site with Joomla recently. It's much easier to mod and maintain, but it's more suitable to a small number of editors.



Nicholas Thompson
20
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Joined: 6th Sep 2004
Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 17:24
I looked into Joomla about a year ago and didn't like its API - I much prefer Drupal's API and its hook's (you can create a module and have it "hook" onto certain events, like submitting a form, loading a page, viewing a page, etc.

mtv.co.uk use Drupal
The Nasa APPEL Project uses Drupal

Maaany other big fish use it too

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Oddmind
20
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Joined: 20th Jun 2004
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Posted: 13th Jan 2007 06:39
zomplog has treated me fairly well. its fun.

Gowmars
21
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Joined: 26th Sep 2003
Location: United States
Posted: 22nd Jan 2007 03:37
Well I decided to stick with wordpress. I played around with it somemore and managed to get it how I want. I also check out some of your recommendations they were all pretty good.

Thanks for the help all.

Kentaree
22
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Joined: 5th Oct 2002
Location: Clonmel, Ireland
Posted: 23rd Jan 2007 13:53
Nick, can you explain what you like so much about Drupal? I'm running it on my site, and it's alright, but I don't see anything too special about it. That said, I havent done any developing for it.

Nicholas Thompson
20
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Joined: 6th Sep 2004
Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 23rd Jan 2007 15:42
Quote: "I havent done any developing for it."

And that's probably why you haven't "seen the light".

Drupal out of the box is pretty average/basic. Its got a very thorough repositry of contrbuted modules + the backing of some major names like Sony (Sony Musicbox), MTV (MTV Flux channel) and a NASA sponsorship program + a LOT of commercial companies use it for their own portals (for example, the company I work for is using it for ALL their big sites!)

The best bit, though, is the API behind it which is getting better by the day. Its been designed to be coder friendly (once you get your head around how it works) and takes all the tedium out of programming and leaves the fun problem solving and creation to you.

For example, if you wanted to create a "filter" which you could add to any Input Filter group, you'd just implement the hook_filter
function in your module.

I've commited a module to Drupal myself - basically, in drupal it defaults to using node/123 (example) for its URL's. The guys at Lullabot (a consultancy company) contributed a module called Path which allows you to provide Aliases for each node (or, in fact any internal system path, eg: taxonomy/term/32 could be aliased to tag/dbp). The problem was, the path module didn't "remove" the origional url so you ended up with two ways to view exactly the same content which could easily lead to Duplicate Content bans from SE's like Google.

My module uses the hook_init function to do a few checks on the current url you entered. If you entered a path which has an alias then it will do a 301 redirect to that alias, forcing the user to use the chosen URL rather than the "back-end" URL. It also now does a few other checks like if the user put "node/123/" compared to "node/123" - it will pick-up the extra slash. It will also check if the current URL is the one that has been set to the frontpage (another feature in drupal) - if so, redirect to the site's root.

A VERY simple module - but quite effective, although its broken in 4.7.4 due to a bug in path.inc which stopped drupal returning the correct alias (if it existed) for any node that had been accessed directly. That's fixed in 4.7.5.

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Kentaree
22
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Joined: 5th Oct 2002
Location: Clonmel, Ireland
Posted: 23rd Jan 2007 18:40
Hmm, interesting. Does Drupal support tagging of content a la YouTube?

Nicholas Thompson
20
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Joined: 6th Sep 2004
Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 23rd Jan 2007 19:15
Its almost core! In fact, the "taxonomy" module is enabled by default.

With a little CSS wizardry you can make it look pretty neat to (a la my site )

Also - there is a Tagadelic module...

Take my site (Drupal Powered, obviously )
http://www.thingy-ma-jig.co.uk/

Each page listed has those little squares at the head of the page with keywords in like "dark basic pro", "games" & "programming" (eg my blog entry about Cloggy's D3D plugin). Each of those goes to a "taxonomy term" page which will list all "nodes" attached to that term. By default its an acceptable list, however you can override it hugely using the fantastic Views Module written by "merlinofchaos" (author of www.angrydonuts.com).

I use the taxonomy_html module which provides the Tags Term block on the right of my site. I also use the Tagadelic Module to provide my Tagadelic Page.

I have a few other modules installed too like Devel, Captcha, Nodewords, Page_title, Pathauto and Spam.

Devel = a developers module allowing cool things like debugging output, query timers, page timers and form post interception.
Captcha = provides the "Whats 1+3" question for anonymous comments and also allows image based captcha if you have the right module installed.
Nodewords = Allows each node to have its own meta data like description and keywords
Page_title = Seperates the NODE title from the <title> in the HTML head, allowing you to set them seperately. Great for SEO!
Pathauto = automatically creates the friendly path for any node, term or user based on your own template string. Whenever I post a blog entry, I just set the node title and hit post, it then takes the word "blog", the current date and the node title (sanitized for bad characters) and makes a nice URL for me
Spam = Uses special algorithms to rate comments for spam - used to work well when i had loads of spam, but since I installed Captche it rarely gets used more than once a week! (I dont get many comments even though I DO get nearly 300 unique visitors a day).



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