The Ultimate Blogger?

[pete3005]

I was crusing sourceforge and found this:

http://geeklog.sourceforge.net/

looks very cool, Sara might like it ;)

Pete

[harmonic]

im an anti-blog person... :(
but it's mostly the little 12 year old girls who rant about who stole whos html and things like that

http://www.gotthegeek.com/content.php?article=flash-9

[Steven]

That is one of the funniest things that I have seen in a long time.

-Steven

[pete3005]

Did you make that Flash movie? Good work :)

While I wouldn't have a Blog myself, many people do, even the staff at Macromedia, Blogs can be more than just a place to vent off, but an informative way to communicate the latest news and developments from programs to medical research.

I also like the Internet because it allows everyone to have their own little piece of it. A fantastic communication tool that everyone should welcome.

I have no problem with crap web sites and boring Blogs, one mans trash is another mans treasure. Just like the TV, if you don't want to read it you don't have to, move on.

I fail to see why you are anti-blog. I am pro-freedom of speech and blogs help that to be a reality. Also the web at its worse is a static text page that is outdated and of no use to anyone. A blog is alive and current, its dynamic, which afterall is what the web is about.

Just my 2 pennies worth :)

Pete

[harmonic]

See, when people are talking about programs and medical research i think of it as "news"... talking about how Jonny dumped Susy and how hot that guy was that you met today... i just dont get that, no one reads it, they get like 2 hits a day...what a waste of hard drive space

btw, i have no idea who made that flash

[Sara]

Chucklin' at Harmonic...I think I get more than 2 hits a day. Blogging is something I have done for over a year now, on the 'net. I have always had a paper journal. I just wanted to keep in touch with family and friends in a different way...other than email of course. It's cool as we are military and move a lot that my friends and mom can visit and see what our family is up to. I don't know if my mom does read my blog or not, I think she may. I do have a disclaimer on the site that basically says if you don't like what I write leave. I do know that my friends from high school (how many years ago?) read it as well as the bloggin' friends I have made. As I read theirs. Some are basic and boring like mine, where I tell about my life and feelings about situations. I rarely link to sites, I do link to other blog sites here and there. I have a webcam picture up, I try and change each week. I also have learned TONS about coding script using Movable Type. There are some stats that say - 80% of all Bloggers are women. I guess we want to vent and let our feelings be known. Not male bashing here, just my opinion. I asked my hubby if he would like a blog, he laughed and said that if I made him one he wouldn't really post in it more than once a year. I made him a hobby photolog instead. We are currently building that so he can show off the models he's built, motorcycle, car and airplane.

My daughters both have weblogs, it's for them to journal what is going on and for their friends to read about their lives.

Thanks for the link, Pete, I had that bookmarked at one time and lost it when I reformatted. :)

Steven, that was too funny! Thanks for the link yesterday! :D

Oh, I have been making progress getting new business for the hosting, guess who the majority of our new clients are? ;)

[harmonic]

Once again, im really meaning about the little girls who blog about the latest cute guy, have jennifer lopez layouts... and have horribly coded invalid html, AND COMPLAIN WHEN PEOPLE STEAL IT! I used to host about 3 of these people, and of my 100-200k hits a day, they got around 5% of that, together

[Sara]

:) I know Harmonic, I like pickin' on you. I think that I have seen tons of those sites as well, as I help with a webring for bloggin' women. Women being the key word, over 18. I wonder if sometimes they even read the requirement page!

[Chris]

I know what I'm going to do now... make a fake blog about a fake life that I don't have. Yea, I know, it sounds crazy, but I believe I am crazy because I work in the fast food industry. But hey, they pretty much support my site now!

Uh... yea, anyway...

Stuff such as "i got my nails done today" or "i got this really cool bass guitar today, it shakes the house. haha" I really don't care for, nor do I actually read it. Also take note of the "I'm too cool for the shift key" method in those examples.

[SmackDaddy]

So....doing my best to get this back on topic.....

What is the "Ultimate Blogger" program? Or is there more than one? I think my daughter would like this even if I am not that keen to do it for myself.....

[Chris]

It appears to be that it's something like PHP Nuke, Post Nuke, Newspro or any other news publishing scripts that you can get out there.

Some of them are quite good. However, their looks are now quite over-used. I would use something like Post Nuke or even PHP Nuke but I don't want to take the time and change the themes around to make it look like my current layout.

It wouldn't be that hard, but still... then you loose data when you make the switch since they're not the same form. (Newspro uses newsdat.txt and all the *nuke systems use SQL)

[SmackDaddy]

Well Chris, unfortunately I would have to disagree with the association of postnuke/phpnuke as blogs. Those PHP portal systems are just that: portal systems.....not blog programs. Portals are 10x more complex than blogs in what they offer...

I use XOOPS (http://www.xoops.org) portal system for my PC Tool Bin (http://pctoolbin.com) site. XOOPS is based mainly out of PostNuke and PHPNuke but is better in many ways (in this former-postnuke user's opinion).

Looking for a blog system which is "the best" as well as something my daughter can easily use. Thanks in advance.

[Chris]

Yes, this is true. They are more complex than something like Newspro or MovableType. However, PHP Nuke, Post Nuke, and XOOPS can all be trimmed down within about 10 minutes of work once you setup a database and upload all the files. As you probably already know, that can all be done through any browser.

Howeverm if you're looking for something more in the lines of "i got a new cell phone today. it makes funny nosies when it rings. haha" then you might want to look into something like Newspro, which is what I use here (http://www.gotthegeek.com) for a non-blog site. You can addon to the main script with addons that will let you have comments, different categories, and just about anything else you can think of. The only disadvantage is that you then have to come up with your own latout and work around that to include the newspro file which has the "news" in it.

Oh yea, the Newspro web site (http://www.amphibianweb.com/) has been "down" for quite a while now. If you want to have a look at Newspro I can email you the zip file. I don't think I have seen the real Newspro program. I was just looking and saw something else that had the same name, but doesn't even look like the right thing.

[harmonic]

for news updates i always used fusion (http://www.fusionphp.com/). but now i wrote my own script, so i use it instead of something you can download.

[Sara]

I use www.movabletype.org to blog with. It's easy to install and can be plugged into MySQL. My 13 and 17 year old daughters use it to post on. :) If you need help with the templates, SD, um, I think I may know someone that can help.

:)

[Chris]

Yea, harmonic is really good when it comes to making layouts. :) He'll do it, say... for about 10 dollars an hour.

:)

[Sara]

Actually I was talking about myself, hahahaha! ;)

[Chris]

Yea, that's why I typed what I typed. :p

[Ailish]

I'm not sure I get the blogging urge.

I keep a journal, but that's for me, and much of what I write there isn't something I want shared with the world. That might be the reserved New Englander in me, though. Doing a public log on top of that seems a bit much.

I think the only way I could get into blogging would be if I could have some way of writing my journal once, but allowing different levels of access to different passages. Some the world could see. Some would be open to acquaintances. A smaller portion would be available to a few close friends and family members. And some would be only for me. Until then, I'll just stick to my journal.

Ailish

[Sara]

Hi Ailish and welcome to IH! :)

There is a way to do that with Movable Type. There are many ways to deny access to different people. For example you could have restricted access for only the people that are the closest to you and a different access for the people at work.

If you are interested, let me know I can give you some url's and you can read up on it. :)

[harmonic]

Originally posted by Chris
He'll do it, say... for about 10 dollars an hour.

if you were being serious... i usually do it for free... i do take donations though.

brandon was going to pay me for deafening urge, except he never got around to it :-/ all the comments he got from it kind of gave me a small ego boost though

[Ailish]

Originally posted by Sara
Hi Ailish and welcome to IH! :)


Thanks, Sara.


There is a way to do that with Movable Type. There are many ways to deny access to different people...

If you are interested, let me know I can give you some url's and you can read up on it. :)

I'm not sure I'm ready to take that plunge, but I'm intrigued enough to take a look, if you want to share the URLs.

Ailish

[SmackDaddy]

As you can tell, it's the pretty ones who use a real picture of themselves in as their "avatar" (i.e. Sara and Ailish)... ;)

Let me also welcome you Ailish to IH. I am relatively new here (1 month) and so far, so good! Actually so far, so GREAT!

As for the Blog info, yeah Sara, could you share that......I am looking for something my 9 year old daughter could get interested in although I want to keep an eye on it for obvious reasons (damn pedophiles).....but I would be interested in what Moveable Type can do for her.....thanks.

[Chris]

Originally posted by SmackDaddy
As you can tell, it's the pretty ones who use a real picture of themselves in as their "avatar" (i.e. Sara and Ailish)... ;)


What the hell... so Smack, you're telling me that your avatar isn't really you?

Damnit! You've got to let us know these things ahead of time. ;)

[Sara]

Thanks SD, that was a nice thing to say!

:)

www.scriptygoddess.com has a wonderful script hacking archive. Easy to use too!

www.movabletype.org is where you can get MT. You can password the directory and make it so only family can see it SmackDaddy. :)

[Ailish]

Thanks for the pointers, Sara.

Before I can start modifying it to work in a way that might be usable for me, I figured I'd try a plain MT installation, and then start tinkering.

Are there any 'gotchas' with a basic MT install by the manual? I'm figuring on using mySQL, and running it in cgiwrap (the MT scripts in scgi-bin, with the static images off in their own directory, with the config modified for this).

Ailish

[Sara]

I didn't put MT in my cgi-bin. It run perfectly fine in it's own folder. I do have it on MySQL though. Check out the support boards if you get a snag installing. :)

One thing about the installation instructions, you have to follow them to the letter. Yeah, go figure, right? I could tell you stories of what I have had to fix for others...

[Ailish]

Actually, I decided I wasn't sure about the cgiwrap stuff, and wanted to keep everything together, so opted for that route.

No real problems with the installation, and I now have a pseudo-blog up (http://ailish.net/pseudo-blog/), in the default configuration. The trick, I think will be in changing it, since editing the templates and style sheets looks a bit complex. Once I spend some more time with them, I expect it'll be fine, but it's just a mass of unfamiliarity at the moment.

I'm also having a problem with an client side updater and XML-RPC, but I don't know if that's the client's problem, or a problem with my installation, yet.

Oh, and SmackDadddy, we all have bad hair days. Most of us just don't post the pictures taken those days. ;)

Ailish

[Ailish]

I never did get a clear sense of how the sort of privacy levels I wanted could be done in Movable Type. As mentioned elsewhere, I recently tried B2, and that looks much more promising.

I just found a fairly simple way of doing this, using the existing version of B2, described in the B2 forum (http://tidakada.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=34). I haven't tried it yet, but it seems pretty straightforward.

Ailish

[Ailish]

I've now got it set up in two directories. One is public (http://blog.ailish.net/), while the other is in a password protected (by the web server) directory. They share the same database tables, and the public blog is a subset of the private blog, containing only those categories with ID < 10 (one could choose any number).

In addition to the forum changes in the thread I pointed to, earlier, I had to make minor modifications in b2categories.php and b2-include/b2.template.functions.php in the public directory, as well. They're all in the same vein, though, so it was pretty easy to fix.

Good-bye Movable Type.

[Sara]

Hey Ailish!

How many blogs can be run on one installation I wonder? I would love to convert my 4 blogs over to b2. Damn, love that program! :)
I'm saying goodbye to MT once I get those figured out and put into b2.

[Ailish]

Originally posted by Sara
Hey Ailish!

How many blogs can be run on one installation I wonder? ...

Hi Sara,

It depends how you define an installation, I suppose. :) To quote the B2 installation instructions, "This release is designed to sit in[...]the folder where your b2-powered page will reside." I don't know enough about the system to second guess that, just yet (I'm only a few days into the brave new world of dynamic web content, I'm afraid). :confused:

I'm running three B2 blogs (my what's new (http://ailish.net/pb2) page, and my public (http://blog.ailish.net) and restricted blog) on my site, and each has it's own copy of the PHP scripts and config files. (And I ran b2install.php for each of them.)

That said, they all share the same database, and the users table is common to all three, and the public/restricted blog share all tables in common. So, it's not unreasonable to argue that this is one installation, either.

Each copy of the distribution files takes ~750K, if you don't trim it, which isn't terrible. If you throw away the CVS placeholders, you can get that down to ~675K. Of that, another 136K is static images, so you could probably use file-system links to one copy to save that space if things are really tight. I'm not close to being worried about space yet, though.

Ailish

[Sara]

Ok, so let me get this straight. You ran install for the 3 different folders and each one has their own php files in the folder where the blog resides. Is that correct?

Did you have to add anything to the config.php to do that? I see where you can add another blog, but you added another one there as well?

Just trying to get a grip on it. I know that they can all share the same MySQL DB which is wonderful, I just don't want to get in there and mess things up. *LOL* I wonder if I can install it in the current folders I'm using for MT...hm.

:) Thanks!

[SmackDaddy]

Interesting.....so if I understand correctly as well....you can have one "install" for the general public....and the other two which have their own specific restrictions as to who can see it?

[Ailish]

Originally posted by Sara
Ok, so let me get this straight. You ran install for the 3 different folders and each one has their own php files in the folder where the blog resides. Is that correct?

Yes, Sara, that's how I did it. I'm not convinced that's the only way, and if not, it's certainly not the best way, though. In particular, I'm now noticing the $pathserver setting in b2config.php that makes me suspect they could all be pointed to the same PHP code. But I haven't tried that.

Did you have to add anything to the config.php to do that? I see where you can add another blog, but you added another one there as well?

b2config.php is the only thing I think you'd have to change. Each blog has its own b2config.php, none of which have references to the others. Things that change are the $siteurl, $blogname and $blogdescription settings for starters. The comment about adding a blog is in the database tables section, where you'd leave them the same to share with an existing blog, or change them to be independent. I have $tableusers the same for all three blogs, since I want the same user/settings/password throughout. My public/restricted blog(s) share all the same tables, though as I said, I had to edit a few of the PHP files for the the public blog, to not show the stuff from the restricted categories. When you run b2install.php, it will complain that it couldn't create the tables, since they already exist. As the note on the B2 forums said, ignore that, and everything works fine.

I haven't looked at b2install.php to see what else it does. If it makes other changes based on the settings in b2config.php, then that could be a problem, otherwise, pointing back to a single blog installation will work.

I have no idea what would happen if you tried to drop this on top of an existing MT folder. It probably wouldn't be pretty. I've now deleted MT though, so I'll leave that experimenting, or not, to you.

Originally posted by SmackDaddy
Interesting.....so if I understand correctly as well....you can have one "install" for the general public....and the other two which have their own specific restrictions as to who can see it?

More or less, SmackDaddy. In my case, two of the three are 'public' and one is in a directory password protected by the web server. We can ignore my 'what's new' blog, since that's mostly independent of the other two. The protected blog is identical to the other public one, except it shows some categories that the public one doesn't. The link I posted to the B2 forum, yesterday, describes the changes that have to be made in the public PHP files so that they don't show all categories.

Ailish

[Sara]

Thank you so much for your emails and posts, Ailish!

I went and put b2 in my blog folder, on top of MT. In fact, I deleted all of MT from it before hand, just leaving the archives. It's so easy to install, not all that CHMOD crap that MT has you do. I plugged into the old archives and presto, all done. :)

I even added another blog, you saw them both today.

Now the next step is doing a private blog, just to see if it can been done. ;) I like doing it...not necessarily keeping it.

Sara

[Ailish]

Not a problem, Sara. You're blogs are looking good! I'll get the hang of templates and style sheets one of these days. :)

Doing a private blog is easy. Just drop it into a protected directory. Splitting the same blog into public/private posts is only a bit trickier, since there's about three files you have to edit.

Ailish

[Sara]

Oh, Ailish, thank you! :) I am trying to get the hang of CSS more and more each day!

I will just make a private blog. I don't know if I will post in it. Maybe I will to complain about my parents, kids, etc. Heh. No one will be reading it but me though!

:) Sara