Entries Tagged 'Weblog tools' ↓

I started creating a satirical take on a society’s website I belong to (and have lots of friends in), in between revising Human Computer Interaction and Thermal Physics (gotta have some fun guys ;)). As I want myself and other people to be able to post news easily to the front page and add images to it (eg photos and videos of committee members doing stupid things), my first thought was “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/.

Then I thought it would be nice if people could create new pages on the site - let those with talent start spoofing pages off the current site. Plus, feeling lazy I liked the thought of creating links in the page template and then browsing to them and sticking in the content - instead of getting out my “FTP client”:http://www.smartftp.com, uploading the files and hoping the design template could be shared between WordPress and static pages.

That seemed to lend itself more to a wiki rather than a weblog. But then the wiki wouldn’t have such a streamlined way to post news (which is needed if most of the members’ have a chance of using the site).

I’ve had a very quick look around for software to do this (while trying to memorize Helmholtz free energy and the Grand Partition Function) but without installing it I couldn’t tell if it would do what I want.

What have you found useful for projects like this? Someone, somewhere, must have encountered this problem before and written a program to do the job.

XML.com: Working with Bayesian Categorizers [Nov. 19, 2003] by John Udell makes an interesting read. I disagree with him though that the classification didn’t work well - I think you have to tune the algorithm more than he did (and maybe classify Author, Subject and Body separately and then combine the weighting).

That’s one of the ideas I’ve been playing with anyhow. It makes things a lot more complicated (and much slower I guess - especially as there doesn’t seem to be a fast (C based) Bayes implementation in either PHP or python) but should give extra accuracy.

I couldn’t understand why he wanted the entries to show in only one category. The way my system (which I know exactly how it *should* work; I just haven’t coded it yet) works is by classifying into multiple categories, using a cut-off % (which will probably vary depending on how many categories there are with a score > 0.01) to restrict it to the relevant categories only.

In my quest for other tools that would support article publishing more ‘naturally’ than MovableType, and are written in PHP, I’ve been putting in quite a bit of surfing. Here’s the results (all links are to the features page if it exists):

* “pMachine”:http://www.pmachine.com/features.php - Not open source, and looks quite similar to MT
* “Drupal”:http://drupal.org/node/view/2 - looks v. promising. However, seems to have ’silly’ (i.e. meaningless) URLs
* “Xaraya”:http://xaraya.com/index.php/news/c28/ - stupid name, but looks to be a promising tool _if_ there’s any kind of blogging capability built in. Seems more skewed towards article publishing.
* “Serendipity”:http://www.s9y.org/features.php - a weblog tool, written in PHP. I like the image management tools, for adding images to your posts.
* “Nucleus”:http://nucleuscms.org/features.php - while it doesn’t sell itself like the other tools, it still seems to have many features.
* “phpX”:http://www.phpx.org/index.php?id=9 - by far the least suited at first glance, as it’s very much a portal system
* “TikiWiki”:http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFeatures - another promising system, certainly seems full-featured, although I wonder how much work it would take to make it work, as it seems quite a rigid framework.
* “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org - an up and coming PHP weblog. I like what I’ve seen so far, but it’s still under heavy development. _[Aside: "Tim Parkin":http://pollenation.net/journal/ is using it for his journal]_
* “coWiki”:http://www.develnet.org/ - this would be the first one I’d try - Rui Carmo has been recommending that I try a wiki (a tool-type I dislike for a number of reasons, not least “BashedURLsAreHardToRead”:# and lack of structure). However coWiki has a “slightly different philosophy”:http://www.develnet.org/CoWiki/ThePhilosophy. Unfortunately though, it only works with PHP5 Oh, and like Drupal, it has meaningless URLs (each page is named numerically), although there are meaningful permalinks. Maybe this is still to be added throughout?
* “BBlog”:http://www.bblog.com/ - Uses “Smarty”:http://smarty.php.net/ as part of its core, with most features implemented as plugins. And, it has *threaded comments!*. Still under very heavy development.
* Finally, and added more for reference as a curiosity, “Komplete Lite”:http://www.interakt.ro/products/KompleteLite/index.php - a free version of Komplete, which can act as a CMS or blog. Interesting concept, but I don’t think it will suit me, as there appears to be too much hand-holding.

I’m guessing I’m not a typical blogger here, as most of the tools linked to above are not really blogging tools. As a keen amateur photographer I want to add a gallery or something to this domain (and yes, while I could install “ExhibitEngine”:http://photography-on-the.net/ee/ or my own gallery program, I’m lazy and would like it integrated)

I also want to be able to integrate Textile into whatever tool I use, as while it has a few problems, it’s one of the best tools I’ve come across yet (I use it here).

As a user, some of the tools listed above being cut down versions of a commercial tool is enough to put me off - I like things to be totally free. But as a developer, I understand their reasoning. I think it’s one of those conflicts I’ll never resolve
I’m planning on downloading a few of these to try them. If/when I get round to this I’ll post some feedback

h4. Changelog

# 2003/08/17
** Added wordpress and cowiki to the list.
# 2003/08/20
** Added BBlog.

Having used it for over a week, I think the answer is unequivecally _No_. I wanted a tool that would let me publish articles as well as weblog entries, without having to create the HTML pages myself. Maybe movabletype can do this, but I haven’t worked out how to make it publish certain categories into different folders on for example.

The date-based model that MovableType and other blogging tools follow makes pointless to go back and update old entries when you have something new to say. Who’s going to find that you’ve added something or corrected some mistakes?

Making a new entry saying “I have updated a previous entry” would work, but increases the noise, without increasing the usefulness.

The solution? I don’t know yet; keep checking this post for updates