What things do you hate and love of your blog platform?
- write/edit with a worst a text editor or best an web ui
- ability to markup in a meta format
- access to the source in a language(s) I use
- good db access tools
- ability to evolve and add new layers or technologies
I also have some quirky requirements. I want static pages primarily (at least at the moment). I care more for load speeds and readability than the ability to interact RT. (currently process interaction on delayed batch close to RT). For all the disadvantages this has a few advantages namely speed and fewer moving parts exposed.
My first effort was a Perl script transforming POD (Plain Old Text) files into markup. The next effort is a Python app using Django to store RestructuredText (python based plain text markup) markup in a MySQL db spitting out valid xhtml static pages. And I've already got a third system in mind using various editors with a light weight middleware web server using a db for backup but exporting to atom (something like http://bitworking.org/projects/1812/ ) and serving a combo of static pages and dynamic using some browser/Javascript approach.
Probably the most important thing is how it handles the data. To tell you the truth I don't really care too much about the tools because I throw or discard them like skins every couple of tech iterations. It's the data that's important. I care more about:
- ways to export the data safely for future use
- ability to add historical entries as I find them out there on the web or locked up in some roach motel of a web app
- re-publishing fragments of data somewhere else to some (or thinking of publishing to some as yet to exist site) other place
- making additions, corrections and upgrading the content over time
I'm finding the current batch of blogging tools worry less about these types of ideas ("with the exception of say Dave Winer & scripting.com who lets face it have more history than most blogs & toolsets than most") than they should. After you get a stack of entries, say 10 years worth the tools need more sophisticated approaches to handle and evolve how you
- generate
- edit, manipulate
- store
- distribute
the "foobar" things you create.
I also get peeved at the way most blogging tools (and most content generation tools) seem to think of blogs as pages and not data that can be transformed into "foo" format and edited, stored in some meta format capable of being transformed.
So in short I love defining my own toolset. I hate the fact it takes lots of thinking, time, effort and sweat. I hate the fact the tools are constantly evolving and are less polished than I know they could be.
I care more about my data than the tools I create and use.
That said, I already like it better than Wordpress. (Which I was using before.) I don't have comments, but I didn't want them anyway. People have written Wordpress plugins for virtually every need I might ever have, but plugins are a pain to deal with for problems that I can now solve in 3 lines of code.
This is sort of a geeks rite of passage. Some I can think of
- spolsky citydesk ~ http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/
- bray custom perl scripts ~ http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Colophon
- dave winer ~ http://www.outliners.com/
- trotts ~ http://www.sixapart.com/about/corner/2004/05/its_about_time....
- ev williams - http://www.blogger.com
- Fitzpatrick ~ http://brad.livejournal.com
"... I don't have comments, but I didn't want them anyway. People have written Wordpress plugins for virtually every need I might ever have, but plugins are a pain to deal with for problems that I can now solve in 3 lines of code. .."
One thing I found was you really think carefully before you create something. I've shunned comments as well (constraints I've chosen) only choosing static pages. The advantages for such a low volume site are speed & reliability. Though I have thought having a feedback loop would be nice have yet to really come to grips how (having no RT server based processing).
I'll let you know the url of the colophon when I release my site.
Wordpress has very limited WYSIWYG support. Also there's no paste special, so when I paste a formatted doc without going via gedit I get a bunch of formatting I don't want.
Some of the plugins, like the captchas, should be there by default. Otherwise your blog will be inundated with Spam.
There doesn't seem to be a good way to mark comments by specific users so they're always highlighted. VentureCake has had comments by Alan Cox, the Twittr developers, and Mike DiPetrillo from VMware. There's no way to highlight these specific comments (or other, cool outstanding ones) by default. There's a plugin I tried, but I didn't work.
The ability of some users to post without moderation, or edit their comments anytime.
Plugins add their menus in different places. I can't always find out where a plugin has added itself until I read it's documentation.
I have to resize images for thumbnails and apply effects (like reflections) myself manually in GIMP first.
Edit: just noticed that Askimet is only free for personal use, so I guess it doesn't help everyone that it is included by default.
Edit 2: by the way, I agree about the plugin menus.
pretty friendly install and web config
can't avoid running it as cgi, which sucks
once I decided to make my entries in restructured text (huge mistake), I can't easily change to using regular html for new ones, which is what I want. Half my entries include an apology for not being able to present some fancy escaping correctly or for screwing up my links. I just want to use xinha! This is likely the issue that will finally cause me to switch blog systems.
spam comments have corrupted stories in the past. A look at the gross NIH article file format will show you that comments-corrupting-stories would not be surprising
anti-spam comment system is too hard to get right. I'm currently on the side of "reject all good comments" and I don't know how to get to a better state
it has tags, but I can't provide an RSS feed for a single tag, which I'd really like
it's in python, which is why I chose it, but the barrier to writing patches or plugins (e.g. per-tag rss feeds, or per-article input syntaxes) is too high
each blog gets a large number of scattered data files, including some dotfiles (why?!), which can make it hard to reorganize blogs or get the perms right when you move everything to a new NFS drive
Thanks for asking!