On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 12:47:13AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
James Elsey james.elsey@gmail.com
I've gone for "Blogger", is there anything exciting Wordpress offers that could tempt me over? I'm using the web interface at the moment, its a bit clumsy, are there any good linux desktop applications that make it easier to type up and organise posts?
The most exciting things that Wordpress offers are better anti-spam tools (instead of Google's disability-discriminating and inappropriate-use-of-wheelchair-icon-using "visual verification") and it's free and open source software (FOSS). One benefit of being FOSS is that there is a choice of handy helpers like http://deepestsender.mozdev.org/ or those at https://addons.mozilla.org/ or applications like http://drivel.sourceforge.net/ and http://qtm.blogistan.co.uk/
I've just been setting up a WordPress site on my home server to see how it goes as a journal for keeping a project history on. I quite like it though it's a bit 'baroque'. I find that changing little bits of PHP inside it is actually more straightforward than I expected.
However, as with nearly all 'server side' blogging tools the actual data entry (i.e. blog writing) interface is rather painful. With nearly all of them you have a choice of:-
Real HTML - straightforward and relatively fast, but hardly conducive to an easy flow of thought onto the page unless you only write text with no headings, images or whatever.
Tiny MCE (or similar) - A 'nearly WYSIWYG' editor which makes seeing what it looks like easier but is s-l-o-w in my experience. On WordPress for example it can't keep anywhere near my keyboard auto-repeat if I delete a string of characters so I always overshoot.
MarkUp - You can get (for example) a reStructuredText plugin for WordPress but it rather produces the worst of both worlds as it's one more step from actually posting your thoughts and is still rather slow.
I use mozex with Firefox so can use vi (vile in my case but vim for most of you I expect) to edit the contents of a textarea which overcomes some of the pain of text entry into WordPress (or whatever) but it's yet again one more step between entering your thoughts and actually getting them onto the blog.
I'm also trying out (having tried it out once before and used it to develop something else) pyblosxom which uses ordinary text files for its blog storage. At its simplest it is *very* simple - you just put your text files in a directory hierarchy whose directory names become the categories of your blog and the mtimes of the files are used as the dates of the entries. So putting a new entry in the blog is just creating a file in the appropriate directory - done!
There are quite a few add-ons available for pyblosxom, it's still being developed and supported (I'm currently having quite an active discussion on its mailing list) and it's written in python which for me is a big advantage. I'm using the reStructuredText plugin which allows me to write in reStructuredText with no extra steps (for me) pyblosxom simple understands that files with a .rst suffix are in reStructuredText and converts them to HTML before displaying them. (So no extra step like WordPress)