Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with blog and software

Easy photo blog software and system for elderly person.

jcdill — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:08:22 -0800

I'm trying to find the easiest photo blogging software for my father (age 74) for his travel blog. My father has a MacBook Pro. He is using iPhoto for his photos. I am trying to find a REAL EASY way for him to incorporate his photos into a travel blog. Budget reasons mean we can't use expensive hosting services where he has to pay $$$ every year. I already have a website where I can install blog hosting software (such as wordpress etc.) but the complication of using one program to upload photo here, then get the online link for the photo, then incorporate photo link there (in the blog) then publish the blog entry is just way too many steps for him. We need a simple solution on the Mac where he can drag-n-drop the photos into a blog entry, type his text, then click "publish" and the software will upload the photos where the photos need to go, upload the text for the blog entry, make the image links automagically.

The photos can be uploaded to the website, or to flickr, or to smugmug - whatever works with this EASY to use blogging software, which MUST run on a Mac. Ideally the Mac software would be free or inexpensive. Open source is ideal, if it is EASY for an older person to use. (It doesn't have to be easy to setup - I can do the setup for him.) Suggestions?

Lightweight blogging software?

Solomon — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:04:47 -0800

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.

Help me find new software as it gets released!

spacefire — Mon, 04 May 2009 06:29:14 -0800

How do I keep up with the latest and greatest PC ,Mac and Linux freeware, shareware and trials, as they are released? I'm looking for blogs and RSS feeds on this topic. I know of lifehacker, but I don't want to be restricted to the productivity field.
Also, I don't necessarily need full reviews.

Offline Blog Reader?

tesseract420 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:04:46 -0800

Offline blog reader? I've backed up my blog into an XML file. I'd like to read it offline. Open Office has XML support but this is not an efficient solution. There are online solutions--importing the xml file into a new blog, for example--but I'd just like to read while offline from the xml file. Is there a program that will permit this?

Best bloggish software for mini-faq creation?

jessamyn — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:20:15 -0800

Looking for a bloggy-CMS or other free tool to make a FAQ-type site. I have a domain and free storage and I'm looking to make a little faq site for a niche topic. However, I'd like it to have community features and not write all the content myself. I've previously used WordPress, MoveableType and Blogger to do various things and I'm comfortable with all of them but I want to make sure there's not a great tool I'm missing. I'm looking for a tool that will allow me to

- have an AskMe type blog format for posting Q&A stuff - i.e. users contribute questions, but it's okay if the questions come in via email or a comment form this will NOT be a high traffic site
- allow commenters to have little profiles and, if possible, log in using OpenID so they don't have to set up a bunch of crap just to comment
- maybe light voting stuff along the lines of "this comment was helpful" and flagging for stuff that's spammy or crappy but I don't need a digg clone.
- have some decent tweakable templates that look okay
- open source is a plus

If WP/MT/Blogger can do this with the right plug-in, feel free to let me know. I'm a little gunshy of Drupal because of the learning curve but if there's a perfect module, let me know. I'm also not against KM type systems but don't have much experience with them. Must be hosted on my site, must be customizeable, must be free or have low one-time costs.

I'm still in the fact-finding part of this endeavor so I may wind up doing somethign totally different but this is what I'm thinking about lately, project-wise. I did look at the other questions labeled FAQ on AskMe but didn't see anything perfect. Thank you!

How do I setup a blog within OS X on an EarthLink-hosted domain?

Lucy2Times — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 08:16:17 -0800

Resources for setting up a blog under OS X on a domain hosted at EarthLink. Does anyone have experience starting a blog on a domain hosted at EarthLink? I think WordPress might be the way to go. I'd like to do this on a Mac running OS X 10.5.4. I'm not looking for heavy database integration or fancy backend scripts of any kind. I'd just like to post text, links, and photos, and some Google AdSense ads. I'd like to be able to tweak the formatting of templates with my own banners, buttons, etc. This doesn't seem like anything major, but I've been unable to find clear tutorials, etc. on how to make this happen. Thank you very much for any assistance you can provide.

What software should I use for a collaborative blog?

handee — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 06:21:07 -0800

I want to set up a collaborative blog with some colleagues. What software should we use? I'm not entirely averse to dealing with hosting and so on, but would prefer something that works "out of the box" or even better, is a free service. Needs: Login for specified users, probably less than 10 but maybe a few more. The ability to have specific "about us" pages for each user (although one "about us" page with a load of A NAME refs would do fine). Customisable layout. That's about it.

Help make grandpasboringstories.com a reality!

Magnakai — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:09:43 -0800

What's the best software to start an easy-to-use community blog/wiki website? The focus is on ease of use for a wide range of users, allowing people to write articles, upload photos, sound and potentially video. I'm totally out of touch with the modern state of blogging software and wiki software, so I'd appreciate any guidance here.

I've been charged with starting a site where a large number of (mostly middle-aged and older) family members from across the world will be able to write about their memories, tell stories and generally ramble on in an entertaining manner. They'll also need to be able to upload photos and (less importantly, but it'd be nice) other media, such as audio and video.

We don't want them to get discouraged by a complicated interface, weird markup or anything else like that. The lowest possible point of entry would be the best one. I'm considering making it totally open, without any need for a login, though that might be a bit dangerous around the spam-bots.

I've searched through the Expression Engine plugins and couldn't find anything relevant. I've also looking through some of the Movable Type one and tried to look through some Wordpress ones, but to no avail. There are tons of each, though, so I may well have missed something useful.

Actually, as I'm typing this, I just realised that something like MeFi could well be useful, especially if there was a way to easily upload and embed images into posts.

Any suggestions would be most welcome! Thanks!

Also, that's a joke URL. Honest!

Weekly meetings are the SUXORS

matty — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:45:41 -0800

A private Twitter for groups? I'm trying to come up with a novel solution for my office... We don't want to have weekly meetings to keep track of what each other is doing. Here's the situation... We all work as consultants on a large project, although in different areas of expertise (though all aviation related).

Weekly meetings aren't cutting it - so I suggested that we do some sort of weblog or twitter-y kind of thing. Something that we can all post to on the fly...

It has to be easy to use. Not everyone here is computer savvy.
Everyone needs a unique userid so we can understand who's talking.
It has to be password protected and not viewable by the public.

Moral of the story is that we want a way to keep everyone updated in the group as to what we're all doing, WITHOUT having to have the dreaded weekly meeting.

Any ideas?? I figure there has to be SOME sort of software out there already. I thought twitter would be a good idea, but I'm not familiar with it and don't know if it can do the 'private group' thing.

How to secure blog content

DerekTheGeek — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 10:03:03 -0800

Blogging platform that can secure/restrict content based on user role? Any suggestions? I want to start a blog for my family but I want to be able to restrict content based upon who is viewing the blog. Some content I would like available to everyone while other content I would like to restrict to family, friends, etc. I would like to have the ability to create roles for users so I can choose which roles should be allowed to view certain content.

I like WordPress quite a bit, however the content restriction plugins I have found are not fully compatible with the latest WordPress version (v2.3). If anyone knows of restriction plugins that do work with v2.3 please let me know.

I have also looked at Drupal, which I use for other CMS tasks, however it's blogging capabilities are limited in my opinion. It's an option but I would like to look at others.

I would prefer an open source solution that makes use of the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack. Thanks a bunch!

Immovable Type?

Asparagirl — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:39:08 -0800

Movable Type question involving the counting and sequential numbering of entries within one specific blog on a multi-blog system. Let's say I have six Movable Type blogs on the same system/install, each containing 100 entries.* I create a new seventh blog, with only 5 entries in that one. Within the individual entry archive template for the seventh blog, how do I structure my tags to output "this is entry #N of 5 in this blog" on the resulting pages? (N would be replaced by the actual sequential order of that entry in the blog, such as "3 of 5", "4 of 5", etc., as determined by either the entry's published date or just the sequence in which the entry was added to the blog, it doesn't matter.)

It sounds simple (and maybe I'm missing something here), but the only likely tag I've found for this, MTEntryID, exports the system ID of the entry in question (which could be #703 or something, or 000703 if you use leading zeroes). That is, it's being counted sequentially relative to the overall install/system, and not to the one blog in which I'm interested.

I can get a total count of entries within just the seventh blog -- the "...of 5..." part -- using MTBlogEntryCount, so that's no problem. But isn't there something similarly blog-specific with regards to entry numbering?

*In actuality, the largest MT install I manage has 95 blogs on it and over 400,000 comments.

Is there a blog platform that allows more than one entry to be "on top"?

duncantuna — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 19:43:01 -0800

Is there a blog platform that allows more than one entry to be "on top"? I write for a blog with a couple other people, currently using blogger.com. One of our problems is that we often trip over ourselves by posting serveral entries per day, bumping the most recent to the top, and others down. Often, this is not desirable.

We'd love to find a blog platform (service or software) that would allow a multi-column format. -- Sure, I've seen 2, 3, 4 column layouts, but every time, one column is for the posts, and the remaining columns are for "navagation" or other modules. -- That won't solve our problem.

I realize there may be other CMS platforms that could handle this more .. "newspaper" .. format. Whatever the solution, it would need to be simple to operate, add and manage posts. A blog format is desirable, as it's so simple to operate.

Is there a blog platform out there that allows for 2+ columns of posts?

Recommend secure blog software for a collaborative project?

citron — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 07:48:41 -0800

Can anyone recommend secure blog software for a collaborative project? I am setting up a web site for a task force to use, in order to post news and collaborate - just to converse with each other, basically. I want to use a blog for this purpose. But.. can I? More on requirements to follow.. It's not on an intranet unfortunately, the task force members live all over the country and need to collaborate online.
The site has to be entirely secure, password protected - no one should be able to view posts or comments. Security is very important!

I don't want to use forums as I think our users would find the interface unwieldy - not all of the users are tech savvy.

I adore Basecamp but it won't work for us in this case, sadly, it has something to do with the trust-level of the actual users who will need to be on "our own site" to have confidence to use it. No, I can't talk them out of this.

We can spend some money on this but there's not time to purchase and implement a full blown CMS solution (yet), though we are looking to do this toward the end of the year. So, bonus if this outputs data in a format we can easily migrate when we get around to it.

I need to set up about 5 separate blogs.

I wonder if Movable Type is a solution, if it can be made secure. We have a secure server but I don't know if I can install and run Movable Type on it - trying to read the documentation now but I'm not an expert here myself and having some trouble understanding what is possible.

Thanks very much in advance for any advice you can give!

Tonight I'm gonna blog like it's 1993

Kadin2048 — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:26:02 -0800

What blog/CMS software would you recommend that doesn't rely on MySQL or another database backend? So, I finally broke down and bought a vanity domain for myself, and I want to set up a small site there, just to provide occasional updates to my friends and family, and maybe host some other content that I want to share. It's nothing big, I don't expect much/any traffic, and I'm not looking to make money off of it.

I decided to go with Nearly Free Speech for hosting, because they offer a nice metered plan that only charges me for the bandwidth that I actually use, which is cool. But they (quite reasonably) charge extra for SQL processes. So I'd like to find some sort of simple CMS that doesn't require a database to run. PHP4 and CGI (all major languages incl. Perl, Python, Ruby) are both OK.

The only things that have turned up so far are FlatPress, which is a sort of WordPress clone that uses flat files, and Simple PHP Blog. Are there other packages that I'm missing? Has anyone ever used either one? How bad are they to set up? FlatPress seems a little light on documentation...at least compared to regular WordPress, which has a lot of 'Howto'-style documentation because everyone and their cousin seems to use it.

This question last August was about alternatives to popular blog packages that don't require complex coding, but I'm less concerned with that than I am in just avoiding SQL completely.

I don't care about anything very fancy, like the ability to use plugins or customize the style very much. I just want a way of throwing content up onto the site, without having to maintain, organize, and edit a lot of static HTML files. I don't really even care about comments, although they're a plus.

Maybe what I'm looking for really isn't "blog" software. Really, I just want some sort of management system, that avoids the static-HTML morass that I dread from my early-90s experiments with personal web sites. (I used to manage things by keeping a local mirror of the site, adding my content by hand, and then using an FTP client to sync the server's copy. It worked OK, but I want to be able to update from the road, without being tied to the machine with the local mirror.)

Anyway, I'm open to any suggestions, experiences, or anecdotes that folks would like to give.

How to set up an RSS feed for my old-fashioned site?

clairezulkey — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 09:01:10 -0800

How to set up an RSS feed for my old-fashioned site? Please know that I only sort of know what I"m talking about in this post, so if my verbiage is off, don't hurt me.

Everyone is telling me that I need an RSS feed in order for my blog to keep up with readers and aggregators and whatnot. I wish I could just ignore the whole thing, especially considering the PITA that this is turning out to be.

I started my site in 2002--it was designed and edited via Dreamweaver, and my host is XO.com (the site is Zulkey.com.) My boyfriend tried to help me get an RSS set up by getting me on Dreamweaver 3, which apparently has RSS capabilites, but the problem is my four years' worth of archives.

I can go without setting up a feed for my old stuff, but I still have no idea how to do it currentl. It probably doesn't help that my site is text-driven and has one long post a day as opposed to several smaller ones.

Is there any way to set up a feed for this puppy that's not going to cause tremendous amounts of time? Would it be best to just transfer the whole thing to a new platform like Moveable Type? And if so, how can that be done? I wish I could just throw some money at the problem and buy some magical program that takes care of this for me in a relatively simple way.

If you want to tell me not to worry about it, that not having an RSS feed isn't hurting me tremendously in the long run, then I'll listen to that as well.

Thanks for reading this damn-long post.

How to build a family website?

mono blanco — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 03:43:45 -0800

How do I build an interactive family website? How do I build an interactive family website?

I'm just now getting up to speed on XHTML and CSS thanks to all the great suggestions in this thread (I'm almost finished with the Head First book, woo hoo!). Now I want to try my hand at building a simple family website which would (1) require a password for entry (2) allow family members to post text and images (3) allow for thread-like discussions and, perhaps (4) permit members to have their own separate pages or sections of the site.

Suggestions? So far I'm doing everything through a text editor to make sure I learn the concepts, but I'd be happy to use appropriate website software. Is this something I should be able to do with, say, WordPress or Moveable Type? Does the interactive element mean I need to learn PHP? My website host says they provide PHP and MySQL Replication, if that's any help.

Which PHP-based blogging tool should I use?

sauril — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 14:23:00 -0800

Which PHP-based blogging tool should I use? I'm getting married this summer, and with most guests coming from out of town, I thought it would be a good idea to set up a blog for any news and information I need to provide. I have a domain and hosting I'd like to use, and I have PHP/MySQL setup on the server. Which package would fit my needs? It would be nice if it a) was free and b) has some decent tempates, my design sucks.

Better groupware for our team?

symphonik — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:48:11 -0800

Our team needs some good groupware. What are your experiences? I work for a small software engineering team as part of a larger department of writers and developers. We currently maintain a wiki which lets us document our extensive toolchain, and allows the rest of the department document their processes and plans. Unfortunately, this wiki has become crufty and hard-to-manage due to its lack of natural organization and unrestrained editing features.

We want to deploy some better groupware for our department. It needs to satisfy our original requirements:

• A place to easily and regularly document our software
• A place to communicate regularly with the rest of our department
• A place where text and images (think reference material) can be easily updated, changed, and organized by other members of the department—remembering that many in our larger department are not extremely tech-savvy

To solve the problems with our wiki, though, this software also needs:

• Real, manageable user accounts
• A built-in hierarchical organization, so it remains easy to navigate as more content is added, deleted, and updated
• A better way to communicate regularly—some blog-style features would be great, with RSS feeds and multiple assigned authors and the like.

We've investigated a couple of products that seem to satisfy our needs: Plone and TikiWiki, but I'd like your input on these products, or hear your favorite alternatives.

Mac OS X Blog Hosting Software?

kdavies — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 07:53:26 -0800

I am looking for a software package to host a blog for our public schools. It would need to a) run on Mac OS X b) allow multiple users c) be incredibly simple for the users to use d) not cost an arm and a leg...or even an arm OR a leg...we're public, you know. As an alternative, we are looking for a very simple way for teachers to share curriculum via the web. There are services out there for this, but most are beginning to charge more than our poor little county can handle. Any suggestions?

Yet another frigging "which blog" question

445supermag — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 14:59:46 -0800

I want to start blogging, but I'm not sure if any blogware / hosting site does what I want. I want to start blogging about my many projects (old cars, guns, amature science, electronics, tools, collections...), partly to encourage me to get stuff done (and therefore have stuff to blog about). I envision it to be kind of like Mr. Jalopy's Hooptyrides, but with more pics and more detail. I'd like comments, but I don't want spam and I don't want the comments inline (so either a popup, like haloscan, or a pop down ). I want to save comments. I want to eventually have a lot of pics up. I want new posts to go to the main page, but I'd like to be able to assign them to catagories, where they would be in reverse chronalogical order (so if you click on "Harley trike" you first see the bare frame, not the finished bike). And I'd like cross catagorization, for instance, a welding catagory that would span all projects. I don't have any server space and I don't have much money, but if there was software that would effortlessly do what I want, I would pay for hosting.
Blogspot would be easiest, but I hear catagories are tough, so cross-referenced is probably impossible. Because I have so many pics, it may be nice to have thumbnails and "click on for larger". I'd also like to be able to display collapsed entries (click for more), so that pic intense entries don't bog down the loading for someone not interested in that particular subject. Also, I haven't programmed html since 1996...

Blog software that supports PostgreSQL

Plutor — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 10:47:27 -0800

I'm interested in moving away from Moveable Type for my blog. Unfortunately, the only DBMS my webhost provides is PostgreSQL. Wordpress doesn't support it. Blosxom seems promising, but I'm behind a firewall and proxy at work, so web-based management is a must. I'm very technical; enough so that I'm considering writing my own blog CMS, and only the time investment is holding me back. What are my options? What do you recommend?

Tracking with Typepad: Need good logs!

Blue Buddha — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 13:32:26 -0800

I currently have a Typepad Pro account, but am not impressed with Typepad's "View Visitor Stats" feature. I need to upgrade the log tracking. I'm looking for decent log/tracking software that would be compatible with Typepad, and relatively inexpensive (~$100 is OK). Something where I can export logs into Excel and play around with number of visitors, most popular pages, click-through rates, etc. Something, but not necessarily, like Statcounter. Any suggestions?

WordPress plugins?

monju_bosatsu — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 09:09:11 -0800

WordPress users: What plugins have you found useful? My wife and I are both new WordPress users, after an arduous battle to wrest our previous entries from Blogger's paws. I'd like to extend the functionality of our sites, but the number of plugins available is a little daunting. What plugins do you use?

Blog Sitemeter

guictx — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 23:17:38 -0800

What free hit counter do you guys recommend for a blog?

What do you think about these BlogWare options?

geekyguy — Sat, 28 Aug 2004 19:43:56 -0800

BlogWare: b2,WordPress or Nucleus? My hosting provider is set up for easy auto-installs on each of these freebies. Are any of these worth checking out? What do you recommend?