WordPress

An excellent <a href="http://wordpress.org">simple blogging platform</a>, also <a href="http://wordpress.com/">a hosted service</a>.

A Quiet Night Before the Northern Voice Storm

Tonight I skipped out on the pre-event party, and instead enjoyed a quiet night of book reading, presentation preparation, and t-shirt ironing before the Northern Voice storm. (Who irons their t-shirts? Me, that's who.) Tomorrow morning I'll present very briefly an intro to blogging, then conspire Lloyd to get people started on WordPress.com, then attend a Moosecamp session or two—a potential session on multilingual blogs looks interesting—and finally attend a blogger meetup. I'll try to sneak in some alone time, at which point I'll have yet another good hearty laugh about what Darren Barefoot wrote yesterday. Then on Saturday I'll attend the conference part of the conference.

I probably won't respond to your email until Sunday.

Embed Quicktime gives you code to create clickable thumbnails which lead to videos
With a WordPress plugin and Drupal module.
Dave Pollard: weblogs are &quot;breeding grounds for dangling conversations&quot;
Drupal and WordPress do a lot of what Dave suggests, but making individual weblogs and blogging the medium more conversational is not just a technical problem.

What Should I Do With sillygwailo.*.com?

I have a Vox site, a LiveJournal site, and a WordPress.com site at sillygwailo.vox.com, sillygwailo.livejournal.com, and sillygwailo.wordpress.com, respectively. The Vox site where I used to make brief quips, when I should really use it for more community-like things; the LiveJournal site I use for writing a private journal to my LJ friends; and the WordPress.com site I used for cynical search engine optimization experiments, though I'm thinking of using it something else (see below). I'd like to continue using all three, but two of them suffer from the same limitation that doesn't affect the LiveJournal site: on Vox and WP.com you can't post without a title and reliably get a nice permalink. Both WP.com and Vox require titles, while LJ does not. With WP.com technically you can, but in the themes I've tried, the permanent link doesn't appear on the front page. For those that don't actually read blog posts but look at tables, here are the services broken down:

Service Requires Titles Permalinks For Posts With No Title Domain Pointing
Vox Yes N/A (title required, though they suggest some if you don't add one yourself; permanent links based on the title, using underscores, shudder) No?
LiveJournal No Yes (all permanent links have the post ID as the 'slug') Yes
WordPress.com No No (it makes permanent links, using the post ID as the 'slug', but they don't show on the front page) Yes
Drupal/Bryght Yes Sort of. Yes*

(I totally snuck "Drupal/Bryght" in there since the company I work for offers a Drupal-powered hosted service and I made sure I snagged sillygwailo.bryght.net while it was available. You can fake permanent links in the theme, and I have an asterisk * with the domain pointing column since you would have to 'rename' the site to a domain, effectively losing the .bryght.net suffix.)

So what should I do with the sites that aren't sillygwailo.livejournal.com? Because I have them, I'm morally obligated to do something with them. sillygwailo.wordpress.com is the best candidate for a "Richard asks questions he's too lazy to research himself", and Vox seems to have more community features built-in than the others, other than LJ, which I use for private stuff. Domain pointing is nice, but not really necessary for me, at least not now. (Though I understand the importance of domain pointing, in that it gives you flexibility if, for whatever reason, you want to change services so that you don't have to change URLs. Flickr, I'm looking in your direction.) Is there a service like LJ—that, y'know, isn't LJ—that gives me a subdomain, has permalinks on the front page but doesn't require a title for each post?

IBM Internet Technology Group chose Drupal over Typo3, Movable Type, and Mambo
First part of their "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site" series. (Typo in one of the graphics.)
Zoli has the text of the wordpress.com server downtime message
"I could have been a nice simple bicycle that people happily rode around on all day. But no, I'm stuck inside this metal case serving web pages instead."
Global tags on wordpress.com
It's a little weird that there's only global tags and not local ones. I added a +1 to the chorus asking for local tags.

Just Enough Features

Seth Gottlieb has written an excellent article on open source CMS', published in January of this year by Optaros. Without the descriptions of example of the individual open source CMS', the document would work very well as a standalone generic introduction to evaluating not only whether (and why) to choose open source, but how to choose the right CMS for the type of website you need.

Deanne has an excellent summary of the article, and to the list of suggested improvements I could add that Drupal could also fit under the "Dear God, this can do everything" category. At my employer's weblog, there was once a "Drupal Does This" category (though my brief article remains, as does Boris' 'Drupal Does This' post on his own site), as it can do brochure sites, news websites (if a satire site can be considered news), and weblogs (like the one you're reading), as well as, of course, community sites. True to its motto, the flagship Drupal site turns out to be one of the better examples of latter type of site.

(Some readers, especially those who watch my del.icio.us links, will no doubt have noticed—and possibly tired of—my promoting Drupal quite a bit lately. It's actually my way of keeping track of developments with not only the software but how an open source project can be organized and maintained. In conversation I've been using it as my only example of how an open source community develops software, I probably need a little more exposure to how other projects' go about creating, maintaining and supporting their software. It would probably help, though, if I knew how to code in something other than PHP.)

In fact, it may be unfair to many of the rest of the CMS' listed in the article, since many of them have frameworks for creating modules or plugins or whatever they call the code that extends and/or builds on top of it. Matt linked to an article suggesting features don't matter, which, in the comments to Matt's link, I say "make it a platform, and people will build just enough features for it." WordPress comes very close to having just enough features for use as a blogging tool, though Matt is careful—and correct—to point out that people are using it for more than just blogging. Drupal is definitely overkill for those that want a weblog. That said, given a set of requirements and use cases (guess what I'm reading up on next?), you can make any modular CMS do what you need it to.

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Matt Mullenweg at OSCMS talking about Wordpress at OSCMS in Vancouver.

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