an interesting discussion in the Textpattern support forum pulls together statements from the creators of Greymatter, Movable Type, and Radio Userland describing the genesis of each application.
What’s fascinating is how different they are.
Someone should gather analogous statements about Blogger, Textpattern, WordPress, and so on.
Origins of blog software applications
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One response to “Origins of blog software applications”
I’m currently learning a lot about “free” webblog applications. The impetus was two fold: a non-techie daughter wanting to join the blogging world and a desire to administrate such a thing without being root on the server I’ve been granted access to by very-techie son.
MT was the default tool available on the shared server when I started blogging a year or two ago. I suffered through a long learning curve customizing my spot on the web. Then MT wanted to start selling their formerly free software. An unfavourable break in philosophy in this server crowd. Thus, all the new improvements were out of my reach (I shouldn’t call them improvements because I haven’t tried them.)
I’d been thinking I’d like to move to a less bothersome “tool” and decided to look for one that would keep both myself and my new user happy.
I surveyed and downloaded a lot of candidates. Some didn’t work out of the box. Those were tossed out and I probably won’t go back to see if they’ve improved, either. This PR stuff has been overlooked a bit IMO.
I did install and get WordPress up and running. But ran into philosophical problems again. This time not about open and free. But about what I consider even worse: disregard for the user base. Simply put, I couldn’t conscience installing and running an application that doesn’t end a user’s logged in session when the browser shuts down.
The new blogger will be using various shared resources for the near future and I couldn’t leave the shared server vulnerable. The attitude on the WP forums was that users should always log out. Well, what about unintentional disconnections? Power outages do happen. I considered writing an “autologout plugin” but decided that since the WP crew hadn’t addressed this in over a year’s time there may be some technical (read: architectural) reason behind the rather obnoxious attitude.
I left the WP installation intact (just in case) and went hunting again. I’m not hunting anymore! Now I am tweaking a blog powered by Nucleus CMS that should be going live any week now. I’m happier with what I see under the hood than I was with MT and session management comes in the box. With some configuration options set, autologout of a sort is good enough for my concerns.
As with most open source systems, users would do well to have programming experience. I don’t know what I’d use if I couldn’t fix the things that don’t work out of the box (plugins usually) or other things I wanted to change.
The downside of having decades of experience is a bit of exasperation at times. Can only improve. I hope.