Minimum hosting features, maximum blogging features?

August 11, 2007 12:58 PM

Very limited webhost features, very fond of content management. Help a student update things easily?

My university offers about 50MB of free webspace to students and not much else. No cgi scripts, no databases, no htaccess password-protected pages. I’d love to generate some easily updatable content using Wordpress or MT, but both seem to require more features than I can access.

My webdesign/coding skillset plateaued in about 2002.

I’m comfortable with HTML and CSS but would rather not re-upload my files with every update. What are some solutions?

posted by betafilter to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Use a different host? Setup your own server (Ubuntu/apache/wordpress will run on that P3-600 your school threw away just grand).

Dreamhost.com accounts can be had for ~$20/year (if you goto the forums and find a referal code for $90 off).

There are also products like CityDesk that might give you what you want.
posted by SirStan at 1:01 PM on August 11, 2007

tiddlywiki generates a plain .html file. I'd use that with those limits.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 1:22 PM on August 11, 2007

Response by poster: I've owned a couple of domains over the years but never really did enough to make paying for hosting worthwhile. Figured I would try to make use the free space while I've got it! I love tinkering with templates and playing with CSS.

Thanks for the tiddlywiki suggestion, i_am_a_Jedi. I'll look into it!
posted by betafilter at 3:38 PM on August 11, 2007

For a tiddlywiki you can just go to tiddlyspot. No need to use your space. Your 50megs can make a great place to host remote images/files ect.
posted by IronLizard at 5:26 PM on August 11, 2007

What about the web-hosted Wordpress? It's at wordpress.com (.org is the official WP site).
www.wordpress.com
posted by Gerard Sorme at 8:45 PM on August 11, 2007

Sorry, the above link messed up. Wordpress.com (free hosted Wordpress without need of your own hosting service) is at:

www.wordpress.com

Good luck!
posted by Gerard Sorme at 8:48 PM on August 11, 2007

I work with the MT team, and I think you could run MT on another server and use it to FTP pages to your account. Google's Blogger used to do that, too -- maybe it still does? Then all you need on your web account is FTP and the ability to serve pages.
posted by anildash at 8:29 PM on August 12, 2007

Sounds like my university, proud as hell of its tech infrastructure but still offering 100MB no-script web accounts to students (and faculty) that are so crippled there is no point.

Meanwhile, f__ing *Yahoo* now offers unlimited storage.

Run your own server. It's easy. And fun.
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:42 AM on August 13, 2007