Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Which software to choose for blogging?

It has been a while since I looked at blogging software. I have been very satisfied with Nucleus CMS for the last year. One of the projects that I will be involved in the near future will envolve a blog-like content management system, so I decided to see what has changed in this area.

As many of your know, I am a strong supporter of Open Source Software. Open Source Software does not provide any solutions for certain types of problems, but content management needs are covered magically well. In fact, there are so many different open source content management systems, that there was a need for a special site that reviews, rates, and demonstrates all of them. This site exists and is indeed very helpful – opensourceCMS.com. If you need just a quick overview of what is available, consider CMS Ratings page.

Looking through the list of CMS – Blogs software, I get the selection of Nucleus CMS, Textpattern, pLog, Serendipity, b2evolution, bBlog, WordPress, BLOG:CMS, Simplog, and PHP-Update. This is a really good selection of tools. Now, which one do I want?

I am more than familiar with Nucleus CMS. It is very flexible, easy to use, and has a good deal of enhancements in the contrib area. I am missing a better WYSIWYG post editor, sub-categories for posts and multipaged posts. A better job could have been done with private and restricted posts. So far, there is no way to do it clearly. One can use drafts or post into different blogs. Still, this is a very good piece of software and can satisfy almost anyone’s needs.

BLOG:CMS is something I have used at some point too. This is basically the same thing as Nucleus CMS, but with a number of themes and plugins packaged and preconfigured to work smoothly. I have stopped using it because of the upgrade procedure, which is alsmost as violent as backup-remove-install-restore cycle. Not much fun when we you have few thousands of posts and a number of handmade customizations.

pLog is something I haven’t touched myself, but heard a few opinions. Alexander Mamchenkov and Vladimir Ivaschenko are both using pLog for their blogs. Both of them confirmed that pLog is a very low-functionality solution which requires a lot of work if you want to do anything advanced with your blog. And I do want to do something advanced with my blog.

Rest of the systems are totally new to me. So I decided to check them out. Thankfully, there is a demo installation for each one at opensourceCMS.com. I went through all of them, but only two really impressed me. These were b2evolution and WordPress.

With a quick overview that I gave both of these, they are very much alike. Both do provide things that I miss in Nucleus CMS (sub-categories, multipage posts, and better post editor). Both also have a tonne of other functionality that I didn’t have enough time looking through. So, if you are looking for a good blogging CMS, try either b2evolution or WordPress. These should provide any functionality you might be dreaming off.

Now that I have found something better I am thinking about migrating from Nucleus CMS, but the amount of work scares me though…

Which web service to choose for blogging?

As I have already mentioned before, my mother is very interested in blogging. She is about to start blogging herself. I am helping her to find the proper tool and get used to the idea. I think it is important to remind here that she is not by any means an advanced computer user.

Features that she needs:

  • Web interface. As easy as possible.
  • Few security levels for posts. She needs to be able to write public articles (viewable by everyone), “friends”-only articles (viewable by a number of people selected by her), and private articles (viewable only by her).
  • Categories for posts. She needs to create several categories for her posts, similar to the way I have it.
  • Searching. Searching for posts that she wrote previously is an absolute must.
  • Comment control. She must be able to switch comments on and off and to limit comments to “friends”-only.
  • Image galleries. She wants to post images from her travelling and day-to-day life. Organization of images, annotations, and comments are all considered and advantage.
  • Favourite links on the main page. She wants to maintain a number of links to her favourite sites and other blogs (like mine) on the main page. In other words: blogroll.
  • Free. She is not yet totally convinced that she wants to blog, thus paying any money for this functionality is not an issue.

After talking to her for a couple of hours yesterday, I realized that she sees my blog as an ideal example. I would have, of course, installed a copy of Nucleus CMS for her on my server, but I am not so sure about the user friendlyness of it. I mean I can easily modify HTML and PHP code as needed for my blog. This is not an option with my mom.

So far I have inspected the following web services:

None of the above services fully satisfy the requirements. Out of all these, Blog.com has most of the features. It has an a very easy to use interface, themable blogs, multiple blogs per one account, categories for posts, image hosting and photo albums, comments control and much more. It even offers easy blogrolling, linking, syndication, and book lists. Surprisingly, the service is free. There are a few limitations though:

  • Disk space. Free account is limited to 10 MBytes. This is more than enough for any beginner who plans on writing text only. With photo albums and image hosting functionality it is pretty easy to run out of though.
  • Bandwidth. Free account is limited to 250 MBytes per month. Again, this is more than enough for a blogging newbie, but can be ran out of easily with lots of images or mild popularity.
  • Advertising. Free accounts will have a mandatory, but small Google Adsense advertising. I don’t see it as a big problem. This is much nicer than banner ad programs that websites used to have long time ago.
  • Minor functionality limitations. Few features are not available with the free account. Most noticably, access statistics are locked, so you won’t be able to see who comes to your blog, from where they come, and what do they want. Also, private blogs (limited to the owner or selected group of people) are also not available.

I personally see these limitations as minor ones. Most people use web services which don’t even offer half the features Blog.com does, so few cut offs are an OK in my book. In case there is a need for more disk space or bandwidth, or if those limited features are all you need, Blog.com offers a really nice pricing scheme.

Domain hunting

After a rather long break in these kind of activities, I am back in action. I have to buy a few domains. I feel that technology did a couple of steps forward since the last time I was playing with anything in this area and I feel very rusty now.

Can anyone of you recommend some software or webservice that will help me to find free .com domains that contain a word or two of my choice? Ideally I should also be able to limit the length of the domain name. Of course I can grab the dictionary file and write a Perl script to deal with the task at hand, but I find it difficult to believe that it hadn’t been done and shared by someone else.

Send you ideas and links via comments or email. Thank you.

digiKam

Contrary to popular belief, Gimp is not the only image manipulation application for Linux. There are a few.

Today I came across yet another one. digiKam is a KDE-based application for editing and maintaining collections of digital photographs. Iti s possible to store images in albums with comments, tags and dates. SQLite database backend allows for more metadata. digiKam also has a number of image processing features. Basically, it supports KDE image processing architecture and thus can utilize a number of plugins from other applications. The usual suspects for image rotation, levels, curves, cropping, annotating, white balance and color corrections are all there. Check it out.

Mouse

MouseGoing around the web and seeing a whole bunch of beautiful pictures fires up the need to photograph something inside of me. Having the will to create beauty and having my creative self totally on vacation really hurts. I know that I can photograph anything and everything around me. At the same time I have difficulty actually seeing the photograph.

I decided to shoot something never-the-less. The first thing that got into my camera’s viewfinder was the mouse. Out of three shots I’ve chosen the last one. I postprocessed it a little bit in Gimp. And here is the result.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-20_POTD