Re: SemiOT: Cherry Blosxom and blogs in general

On Fri, 26 Apr 2002 13:57:08 -0400, Hal E. Fulton wrote:

> Since Cherry Blosxom was just posted, I thought I'd take the opportunity
> to educate myself a little, if Rich and/or someone will answer a
> question or two...
> 
> About blogs in general:
> 
> 1. Are these intended for wiki-like sites where anyone can post? Or
> diary/journal-like sites where only the one author can make additions?
> Or is it both?

Let's look at blogging... What is the definition of blogging?  (I really
hated the word at first, but it seems entrenched so I've made my peace
with it)  It originally came from the term weblog, etc.  Here is a
summary:

http://newhome.weblogs.com/historyOfWeblogs

What Dave Winer sells (which I don't use or know about) can almost do what
you want, (I think Radio.UserLand.com is the piece of software).
 
> 2. Is it assumed that the entry-creation tool will run on the same
> machine as the web server? And is it CGI-based? In other words, can the
> tool and the server be both local, both remote, or one of each?
> 
> And where does Cherry Blosxom stand on these issues?

Cherry Blosxom is very bare bones.  I should've summarized it better in my
announcement.  It reads all of the .txt files in a given directory sorts
them by modification time, and spits them out in a pretty format (note
that the default isn't very pretty, but it supports templates and CSS for
beautifing them).

This means that you are pretty much just editing raw snippets of html
which blosxom will spit out in a full page.  So, if you have a web host
that allows you cgi access you can use (Cherry depending on if ruby was
installed) Blosxom, but you'd need to get your textfiles up there (which
would probably require ftp or maybe WebDAV if you got slick with it).  It
does not support the cool things that something like Scoop or Slash or
phpNuke (perl, perl and php respectively) can do.  They all support users
and comments.  Blosxom just supports your own writing, and through this
other thing called Blagg, it can suck in RSS/RDF feeds (by turning them
into text fields).  For a look at a slightly CSS'd Cherry Blosxom blog,
look at http://65.215.8.195/cgi-bin/cherryblosxom  (which will be up
until about 5:10 PM EST)

> My situation is this:
> 
> 1. I use Win98, sometimes Linux, on the desktop. 2. My web hosting is
> all remote -- UNIX-based, far away, accessed via FTP and telnet. 3. I'd
> like to be able to add stuff to certain web pages in journal-like
> fashion without bothering to FTP or telnet or fire up HomeSite...
> 
> Am I looking for blogging software or something else entirely?

So, for your situation, I don't really know.  If your hosting situation
pretty much gives you root, you could script some things to make it rather
automatic.  I am sort of in the same situation.  I am hoping to eventually
host everything at home over DSL, but I am currently hosting from my
Solaris machine here at work.

Let me see if I can ramble to a bottom line...  I would say that in the
end you are probably looking for a cross platform web publishing tool that
just doesn't exist yet (?).  If you just want to do it on Windows (or mac)
Radio Userland will work. (as will blogger.com and blogspot) danchan.com
has a commentable weblog software (free (as in beer maybe?)) but it relies
on his server to handle the comments.

Well, that was a good ramble, eh?  I'm happy to answer any questions
anyone has out there, if it is seriously OT, I suppose you should email
nutate@(various free and non-free email providers).com :)

-Rich

(BTW Cherry Blossom Clinic with Terre T. just started on WFMU.org if
anyone wants to take a listen to a rockin' radio show)