Lightweight blogging software?

June 3, 2009 5:04 AM

Please recommend a small, lightweight blogging software.

I'm using Wordpress for my main blog, but I'd like something that has a smaller bandwith & space footprint for my other blogs. I did look into Chyrp, which would have been ideal, apart from the fact it was flashing my MySQL password to the entire internet. For obvious reasons, I don't wish to use that software, but rather something like it.

The features I'm looking for are:

1] Free (as in beer) software.
2] Doesn't take up a lot of space. I'd prefer 1 megabyte to 2.
3] Doesn't use large amounts of bandwidth to serve a page.

The pages I'll be serving are completely text, to cut down on bandwidth usage. All I want/need is a very minimal interface, on the back and front of the blog. No images, certainly nothing like flash.

I have very minimal PHP etc skills, but I'm prepared to get stuck in. I do not want a service like Blogger or Wordpress.com. I want to be completely self hosted.

posted by Solomon to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Blosxom.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:08 AM on June 3

Seconding blosxom. It's tremendously limited in terms of the control it gives, but it does kinda work - and I know at least one mefite that uses it for a personal blog. (No, it's not me and I'm not telling)

I used it a few years ago - and basically seem to recall you just FTPed text files up to the server - date was determined by file creation date, so if you changed a word that piece became your latest entry - which was sub-optimal for me trying to be funny if I came up with a better turn of phrase in my sleep.

This was a few years ago and that was the biggest problem I recall - they may have improved on it in that regard recently - but it's definitely worth checking out.
posted by Sparx at 5:24 AM on June 3

You could also look into something a little more esoteric like Chronicle, Ikiwiki, or Jekyll, all of which are static site compilers. You provide a directory of nicely structured text files (in Markdown, Textile, or some other lightweight markup) and it spits out a directory of static .html files.

You can't get any simpler than that -- copy them up into your web root and you're done. Awesomely cacheable, almost no server load to serve them, etc.
posted by SemiSophos at 5:40 AM on June 3

Pivot. Dymanic, but without the need for a database.
posted by ijsbrand at 5:50 AM on June 3

I too used blosxom for a personal blog for a little while, about 5 years ago. It is simple and lightweight, and there are extensions that do most things. If you know perl, that's a huge advantage I think. While it generally does "just work", having some perl knowledge lets you troubleshoot/tweak things to a greater extent.

As for the dates on the entries, yeah, it defaults to the date of the file. There were ways around that; either a plugin that allowed you to mess with things, or modifying the file date. Can't remember exactly.

All that said, I don't know if anything's been done to blosxom. The original creator gave up on it. There was always a php version "in the works", but it never really came around (to my knowledge).
posted by inigo2 at 6:11 AM on June 3

I used Simple PHP Blog because I wanted a simple blog with absolutely no formatting (long story). Anyway it's pretty simple, and I don't even know PHP.
http://www.simplephpblog.com/
posted by amethysts at 7:29 AM on June 3

What about setting something up with CushyCMS?
posted by study the living world at 10:17 AM on June 3

3] Doesn't use large amounts of bandwidth to serve a page.

The bandwidth used to serve the page depends 100% (in wordpress, anyway) on the theme you're using, and 0% on the blog software used. You could configure WP (and probably most other decent blog systems) to send the most light-weight possible page (see, e.g., syndication feeds).

As for your disk-space requirement, this page doesn't list install size, but it might give you some options to look at: Blog software breakdown.
posted by toomuchpete at 10:18 AM on June 3

Blosxom is eccentric and I love it. It runs my personal blog because I like fiddling around and having a lot of control over how my website works — note that I'm not a programmer, but I have some high-level familiarity with programming and I have friends who help me when I get in over my head and break my blog. Blosxom is pretty secure, it doesn't require a database, it takes up very little disk space, and it doesn't need to be updated all the time (or ever).

One of the eccentric aspects is that it has very few features out of the box. No commenting system, no way to write posts except by uploading plain text files to your server (written in properly formed HTML), no search engine, a clunky category system, etc. There are lots and lots of plugins that add most of these features, but it's not always easy to track down plugins. Here are the ones I have installed, for example: timezone, meta, smartypants, headlines, writeback, interpolate_fancy, rss10, tagging, atomfeed, better_title, categories, date_fullname, entriescache, file, find, flatarchives, flavourdir, fmtcat, fortune*, moreentries, storystate. *I modified fortune to make a "pseudo-random post" widget.

The official blosxom.com website is old and unmaintained. If you'd like to learn more, you want blosxom.sourceforge.net and The Unofficial Blosxom User Group. See this post for the latest release (2008-07-23). There's also an IRC channel, #blosxom on irc.freenode.net.
posted by dreamyshade at 11:02 AM on June 3

wordcraft.
posted by jimw at 10:04 AM on June 4

How about SkyBlueCanvas?
posted by divabat at 2:31 AM on June 10