Blogging software
Livejournal's recent decision to stop offering Ad-free blogs to new users has only made me more confident in my decision to switch to hosting my own blog.
I asked around about blogging software at the last planning meeting for the Linux Plumber's Student mini-conference. Jen (Andy Grover's wife) had just done some blogging consulting. She said she hates Drupal because it's too bloated and hard to install, and she also didn't like Wordpress for various reasons. She recommended I look at Six Apart's Movable Type and PyBlosxom, which is written in Python. I'm leaning away from Movable Type because it's not free as in beer. Plus I'd like to get as far away from livejournal and six apart as possible.
This morning I briefly looked at PyBlosxom. My first instinct was to find blogs that use PyBlosxom and see if they were totally ugly. The PyBlosxom website has a list of blogs that use PyBlosxom, so I perused that. There was the normal mix of simple, cluttered, and crazy layouts, but I did find several blogs that looked really nice. The fact that good layouts exist, and that most of the blogs didn't look too awful, gives me some hope that I could get PyBlosxom to do what I want. You can look at my delicious bookmarks that are tagged with PyBlosxom to see the blogs I liked. I particularly like the eye candy on this blog.
Later I'll start looking at the technical details. Someone mentioned there were Markdown plugins, which is a big plus for me. Markdown is perfect for turning simply formated text into clean HTML. It also allows a user to embed HTML in their original text, which is great for those HTML control freaks. ;) It's the best wiki syntax I've run across.
I'll post more about PyBlosxom later. Maybe I'll actually make to the Beer 'n Blog this Friday and come away with more blogging software recommendations.
I asked around about blogging software at the last planning meeting for the Linux Plumber's Student mini-conference. Jen (Andy Grover's wife) had just done some blogging consulting. She said she hates Drupal because it's too bloated and hard to install, and she also didn't like Wordpress for various reasons. She recommended I look at Six Apart's Movable Type and PyBlosxom, which is written in Python. I'm leaning away from Movable Type because it's not free as in beer. Plus I'd like to get as far away from livejournal and six apart as possible.
This morning I briefly looked at PyBlosxom. My first instinct was to find blogs that use PyBlosxom and see if they were totally ugly. The PyBlosxom website has a list of blogs that use PyBlosxom, so I perused that. There was the normal mix of simple, cluttered, and crazy layouts, but I did find several blogs that looked really nice. The fact that good layouts exist, and that most of the blogs didn't look too awful, gives me some hope that I could get PyBlosxom to do what I want. You can look at my delicious bookmarks that are tagged with PyBlosxom to see the blogs I liked. I particularly like the eye candy on this blog.
Later I'll start looking at the technical details. Someone mentioned there were Markdown plugins, which is a big plus for me. Markdown is perfect for turning simply formated text into clean HTML. It also allows a user to embed HTML in their original text, which is great for those HTML control freaks. ;) It's the best wiki syntax I've run across.
I'll post more about PyBlosxom later. Maybe I'll actually make to the Beer 'n Blog this Friday and come away with more blogging software recommendations.