blogZero

This is the fifth and final installment of the Specificity series. In it I'll be taking a look at open-source blogging systems written in PHP. The last post on debugging PHP was a bit of a departure, this one lands squarely back in the realm of targeted CMS applications.

What do I mean by targeted? Well, there are general-purpose CMS packages, and there are ones that are designed for a more specific role. But this gets confusing, because many cross over into other territory. Take for example Trac. Is it a software documentation Wiki, a front end to Subversion, or an issue tracking package? Well, all three.

Blogware

But we should get back on track. The number of features in a sophisticated blogging platform is remarkable. The guys who build these packages are very talented (for the most part) and work their butts off. And users new to blogging may find that the jargon alone is overwhelming. But the cool thing about these packages is you can start with a simple one, and work your way up as you get comfortable. Lots of them have import/export features that allow you to move data from one to the other.

If you're in the market for any of this software, take the time to do your homework. And remember you can always try before you install, or go with a hosted solution so there's nothing to do except tweak your blog until you're satisfied. And if you're not, try something else!

Conclusion

There is no conclusion. I succeeded in nothing I set out to do. Instead of making any headway towards trimming the number of reviews in the PHP category, I more or less only moved a handful and added a bunch of additional ones to the newly created sub-categories. I will probably take a closer look and do some more segmenting. At the very least I learned a lot about the topics covered in this series.

Specific Navigation

• Part I: Frameworks
• Part II: Wikis
• Part III: Content Management Systems
• Part IV: Debugging
• Part V: Blogware
• Part VI: Performance

Wow, talk about a hiatus. Looking down at the previous post it's been over a year since the last time my shadow has darkened this doorway. Below are a few recent items of interest regarding development and the Web in general. To me at least. But who am I kidding? I must be the only person left who actually still reads this blog.

jQuery I spent a lot of time evaluating the myriad of JavaScript libraries out there and I've settled on a favorite. jQuery is compact, fast, powerful, easy to use, and extensible. If you haven't tried it, do yourself a favor and do so.

Chrome The long-awaited browser from Google, in beta naturally, has arrived for Windows XP and Vista. Versions for Linux and Mac are on the way. Built from WebCore (the rendering engine that forms half of Apple's open-source WebKit project), Mozilla's Firefox and V8, the open-source JavaScript engine from Google. Although you'd think they would come up with a more original name, one intriguing feature are tabs that sit externally at the top of the browser window and each one runs in its own virtual space, so one misbehaved Web application won't crash the entire browser. You can also monitor the amount of memory taken up, the amount of CPU used, and the network activity for each tab via the Task Manager.

Google Turns 10 Has it really been that long? Actually, Larry and Sergey first met in 1995 at Stanford where Larry was considering going to grad school and Sergey was assigned to show him around. The rest, as they say, is history. To the best of my knowledge, the magic 9-27-1998 date is when Google was officially incorporated.

Also long overdue, last month's DC PHP Developers Group (now located at the DC Greenpeace office) featured a presentation on the CodeIgniter open-source PHP Web application framework, by Oscar Merida and Matt Gibbs of Forum One. Next month will feature Barry Austin on MySQL Optimization for Developers.

Stay tuned, I may just be back sooner than 12 months. In fact, you can count on it.

I normally only get a few comments, I also get some spam. The usual crap: drugs, porn, gambling... Not so many that I can't moderate them without much hassle. But not today. The same asshole was slamming me with blocks of 50 to each of several posts before I shut him down. Comments for all old posts are closed.

I had the same problem with trackbacks a few months ago and disabled them. Hey spammers! Get a fucking life, would you? I know of at least one Web developer who closed his blog for good, in part because of dealing with you pricks—and a real shame if you ask me because he had a lot of interesting things to say. Actually, you can find some newer articles from Tommy over at SitePoint.

Guess what spammers? Not one of your stupid comments has ever gotten through. You're wasting your time and, worse, mine. So why don't you just give up?

Technorati has just added a new feature, which allows you to bookmark your favorite blogs and track the most recent posts from them in a combined format. I guess some people might call this an aggregator, or even a feed reader (of sorts). Not sure about that, but it is a handy feature. They limit you to 50 total favorites.

Some nice tools include the ability to import a blogroll/subscription list in OPML or XOXO format (a help page explains how to export them from popular RSS applications). They also provide a bookmarklet which you can drag to you toolbar, allowing you to add any blog to your list as you visit it. You can also insert a Favorites Widget on your site, which will display the last three posts from your list of blogs. And of course the ever-popular chicket, add this blog to your favorites:

Which I know you are dying to do (or at least steal my button).

I added a few favorites of my own, to test out the system.

Via the Technorati Blog. There's a shocker!

Measure Map, the blog traffic statistics/analytics application from Adaptive Path, has been acquired by Google, and along with it, Jeffery Veen will head up the Google Measure Map Team.

Sheesh, between Yahoo! and Google acquisitions, I wonder if there will be any indy Web apps left by the end of the decade.

I signed up for a beta Measure Maps account months ago, and still haven't heard anything. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Via O'Reilly Radar.

+ For my inaugural DC Metroblogging post, I've written an article on installing and using the Performancing blog editor Firefox extension. Which is awesome—Jed Brown is the man.

Visit Performancing for Firefox.

From David Sifry and Technorati, some exciting stats (complete with graphs) on the exponential growth of blogging over the past several years: State of the Blogosphere.

A few highlights from the summary:

• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

There are a lot more details, many of them specific to how much data Technorati handles. I used to complain about their performance problems (which has been much better of late), but wow, they have their hands full and there's no end in sight.

Keep on blogging on!

Jason says So long, Technorati, and I don't blame him one bit. I've been increasingly frustrated with the speed, reliability and results of their system for months now. Even after the "new" Technorati came out recently, they seemed to have done nothing to improve the basic infrastructure of the system. It's just a new cover on an old book with a broken spine.

As for the acquisition rumors, I don't know who'd buy such a mess, but if someone does, I look forward to them improving it to a usable level. Pretty much everyone I talk to in the industry thinks the site sucks and we've just been waiting for it to get better because, well, it would have to at some point, wouldn't it? Well, I'm tired of waiting. Goodbye, Technorati...your url will darken the door of my browser no longer.

I've been saying the same thing in response to many blog posts with similar complaints. Fix the engine, worry about hype, sales, and user experience later. Hell, valuable results (content) and a decent response time are user experience.

One more example, and then I will leave this topic alone. I'm subscribed to several RSS feeds from Technorati that return result sets on certain blogs I watch. Every time, and I mean every I refresh my feed reader I watch the list: bing, bling, zoom...one by one and then it stalls:

Waiting for technorati.com...

While checking on something else today, I noticed that Shirley has completed what I would imagine was a pretty tough server move from Windows IIS (yuck!) to a new FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL and PHP box.

Welcome to AMP Shirley! I run the exact same setup. If you are planning a similar move, and in particular if you are using Movable Type as your Weblog system, there are a ton of tips and insights for you on Brainstorms and Raves.

Much to my surprise, I discovered today that SourceForge has a new blog, and they are using the open-source PHP Serendipity blogging system, as I am. It appears as if their blog has been up since June, 2005 and thus far this month they have one post titled LinuxWorld and the First Refactoring Sync, which is dated the same as this trackback.

Stop over for a visit, you will notice right off how similar the layout out is.