blogs: which platform is best?

http://i42.tinypic.com/107mm86.png

hay i have to create a blog for a job and i really dont know shit abt this stuff - give me yr valuable opinions plz - thx

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=52

"youll see it has all the benefits of being on a message board full of crazy people"

so maybe a free wordpress.com blog w/a custom domain???

wordpress would be my first choice.

whats the dif between hosting w/them or hosting somewhere else?

besides that one is free and one costs $$$

whats the dif between hosting w/them or hosting somewhere else?

the latter will require some knowledge of configuring webserver and database setup/admin. i always get a techier friend to help with this.

i guess what im asking is what are the benefits of hosting elsewhere - there are btw a bunch of hosts that have wordpress ready to go out the box

Yes, Wordpress is most people's current favourite. Simple well-designed dashboard, reliable service, excellent spam comment filter.

Benefits of hosting your wordpress.org blog elsewhere: total artistic control over your design template, access to vast array of plugins.

Benefits of pointing your wordpress.com hosted blog at a custom domain: easier, cheaper, no need to worry about backups etc.

Benefits of hosting your wordpress.org blog elsewhere: total artistic control over your design template, access to vast array of plugins.

if its not too much trouble could u plz go a little more in depth here - like in particular whatre the design options on a wordpress.com blog

im sure i should just create one and fuck around w/it prob

OK... on a wordpress.com blog, you're restricted to a set of pre-designed standard templates. There are quite a lot of them, and some of them look very pretty - but they won't be unique to YOUR blog.

However, for a small payment you can gain access to the CSS code for the template. This won't give you full design control, but you can at least change colours and fonts and stuff. That's the route I went down, and my design does now look reasonably different from anybody else's.

Wordpress.com blogs do offer a decent number of sidebar widgets, but wordpress.org blogs offer many more.

As a wordpress.com user, the only aspect which frustrates me is not being able to move the Search box and RSS links elsewhere in the template. But set against this, I'm very much in favour of NOT having to pay for the "privilege" of Wordpress not hosting my site for me...

OK... on a wordpress.com blog, you're restricted to a set of pre-designed standard templates. There are quite a lot of them, and some of them look very pretty - but they won't be unique to YOUR blog.

This is true but a number of templates do allow you to upload your own header/footer/sidebar image to uniquify the look of your blog. I just think it's less hassle to go with wp's hosting.

thx 4 the advice dudes :)

host it yourself, it's not at all hard and you can easily do it yourself or teach self to do it. you've way more flexibility if you host it yourself as you get access to open source widgets which others have made (for every conceivable thing you want to do on your blog)

that said I think Wordpress hosting must be included in my webspace package because I've never heard anything about having to pay more.

just looked upthread and you've noticed this. go with wordpress.org, chances are you'll want to do something down the line that a wordpress.com blog can't do.

i know jack shit about websites and stuff but i got wordpress up and running on my domain in like an hour no prob

yeah max otm...I am mystified at the idea that it's hard.

went w/wordpress hosted by third party - after messing w/the free one for a few minutes agreed def not enough flexibility

btw heres an email from a friend that went way over my head but might be of interest to someone

I have been using textpattern for my stuff because it's very simple and I can PHP the data from the DB, and just know how to use it, it's more programmer-ee though, you have to use their proprietary mark-up language, which I actually like, stuff like *this will be bold* "Click Here":http://www.fuckyou.com. I know, however, that it's not the best but i have no other computer friends who do this stuff, so i have no idea. One that is really advanced, and free, and could be pretty amazing if I every get into it is SilverStripe. I tried to install it locally on my machine, but need to install a new php graphics unit, so haven't worked on that yet. it has a very modern interface, like a local program might, and allows real image resizing and a wysiwyg interface. The thing is, it can do tons of stuff, and most people just want to have entry / entry / entry with image / entry. So, I don't know. Everyone seems to be centering on Drupal and Joomla, but I haven't bothered to get into those. I wrote the CMS on ØØØ from scratch myself because there is a voting system in there for each peeve.

Movable Type was so much better than Wordpress, but I've used neither in the last 3-4 years and the Wordpress people have really charged ahead and somehow made their shite product the more popular choice.

oh yes - Textpattern (TxP) is a great successor to Movable Type, I wish the two would join forces and knock WP and all its buggy code out of existance.

hay feel free to direct me to some sweet wordpress themes now

what style are you keen on? I like the plain style ones, think they're called plaintxt or something.

Movable Type was so much better than Wordpress, but I've used neither in the last 3-4 years and the Wordpress people have really charged ahead and somehow made their shite product the more popular choice.

have used both for long time and there's no way MT is better than WP

yah i want something simple def xp

http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/

those are nice but maybe toooo simple

prob use an image header tho not one of those lol fattay ones that take up the whole screen

maybe you weren't using MT to its fullest capabilities then :) I've yet to see anything done with WP that was nearly as interesting as the stuff my friends and I were able to come up with in MT. Maybe I am just a module-oriented person.. I used MT, PHP and a bunch of txt files to make a pretty interesting site that allowed free template designers to submit templates and with a push of a button (or two) users could skin their websites with no knowledge of HTML whatsoever. Can't help you though bro, I've been out of the free template "business" for a while.

I like this theme, of which there are a coupla variants. Pretty flexible and looks a bit more website-y than your standard blog.

I host wordpress on my own site, took a really basic theme and hired somebody to tweak it to basically match the look and navigation of my website. Now I think I'm going to just move the entire website into the blog anyway!

http://acuterecords.com/blog/

after looking around a bit ive decided on a two column right hand menu fixed width theme - really the default wordpress theme "kubrick" is closer to what im looking for than most except i dont want the rounded edges and id like a shorter header

obv i could just fuck around w/the css but there must be something that pretty much looks like that already no?

o and im not sure wordpress supports this but if there some fancy ajax shit for revealing whats after the jump thatd be amazing

in fact i would consider a diff platform if it had that

well here i go http://ulyssesonline.com/2006/09/05/top-wordpress-ajax-plugins

okay I've basically gone from "FUCK YOU WORDPRESS" to "wau Wordpress is EASY wau" in the span of 24 hours

(setting up an internal blog at work; first attempt nothing worked but the second attempt everything worked with little-to-no hassle)

So does anybody have a web host recommendation? I feel like the cheap ones are all problematic. No matter which you research, you're gonna find dozens of people complaining of outtages and bad tech support. Dreamhost, Bluehost, AN Hosting, Gator Hosting, Media Temple, etc...

Anybody having a great experience?

never had any significant prob with bluehost for the last 3 years.

dreamhost isnt the best but i havent had any problems yet and its cheap as all get out

bytemark.co.uk is a bit pricey and requires some technical chops but you get your own virtual machine that you can install anything you like on, and can host up to 10 domains with their basic package

not sure how this works for americans though

I just want a host that is decent and if usage spikes up, they don't just shut me down but give me a warning and give me time to upgrade!

A Small Orange gets good reviews for smaller sites.

Dreamhost was a total fucking disaster last year: Blackouts in LA revealed their co-lo's insufficient power generation capabilities, so they had a bunch of cascading power-related hardware failures, many of which they were ill-equipped to handle. I've been with them since 2002, though, and 2008 has been the only year I've been unhappy with their service. Things have been good with them lately, in particular.

If you go with DreamHost, there's a coupon on Dreambook.com's front page, turns out. I was reminded of the old guestbook site and went to see if it was still running..

i liked w/jaguarpc.com when i used to fuck w/them - theyre the best cheapo host ive dealt with - def irl fastest for the $$ ive seen

btw anyone found a good stats plugin for worpress - i just want one thatll display in the admin page w/o any drama - its so fuckin dumb how u have to go through a wordpress.com to use their stats - fuck a double login

slicehost are pretty good if you don't mind doing pretty much everything yourself.

have used both for long time and there's no way MT is better than WP
Does WP have a static page option? seems like every time I get a link to a popular blog post and the blog has died b/c of traffic it's a WP blog. That's a big MT advantage, I think.

I use that stats with the wordpress.com login. Once I sorted that out it's fine and does anything I'd need.

Glad this was revived because I'm about to bite the bullet but still don't know. Basically every small shared-host service is rushing to the bottom offering "unlimited" everything for 6 bucks a month and none of them are really unlimited because soon as hit certain peaks they tell you you went beyond something in the terms and they cut you off. And many of the complaints for several of the above-mentioned all say that the host just killed the site with no warning, instead of a simple "you're nearing the limit, or you've passed the limit, do you want to upgrade or we'll shut you off".

I don't even mind paying more, but it seems like the next step up is much more money. I'd be perfectly happy to pay 12-20/mo for a shared service that actually worked and should the site take off and require a dedicated server, they just tell you and don't cut it off.

Media Temple claims to work that way, but I've heard of problems with them as well, and people say you're paying for the style and not substance.

yah i have no idea why more places dont offer scalable hosting - seems like a no brainer

I just read some good reviews of Media Temple, about their support and their ability to handle spikes and may give it a try. Maybe it's the apple fanboy in me that is turned on by their site design but I look at stuff like Gator Hosting, Dream Host etc, and just want to poke my eyes out.

This is the post I'm talking about, check out the comments:

http://www.glennwolsey.com/2007/06/09/big-props-to-jason-mcvearry-and-the-media-temple-team/

the biggest negative media temple post is here:

http://www.futurosity.com/why-media-temple-sucks-save-money-on-web-hosting-dreamhost

Both of those posts are old and it seems like media temple updated some stuff. I don't know what to do really.

However EVERY mention I see of Dreamhost is negative. Of course that may just be due to the numbers...the largest host will have the most people with problems, relatively speaking.

I pretty much only hear bad things about media temple these days

lol i had a bad experience w/dreamhost once

any other suggestions, stet? I'm no programmer but will be working with somebody who's pretty fluent. Still, I don't want something too confusing. Slicehost looks cool and to the point, but I'm affraid it'll be to obtuse or something.

I really like slicehost atm, because you can change the specs of the machine you get pretty much instantly. You can also order extra ram separately on their cheap plans: most folks make you upgrade processor and disk (which I don't need) at the same time.

wait, I'm talking shit. It's Linode I'm talking about above, not slicehost.

Linode looks like Slicehost. Geared at developers. I wish there were shared hosts with similar attitudes and professionalism.

it all looks really good, but also over my head. No cPanel, one click wordpress install/updates, etc.

I always have this problem, like when buying a tabloid laser printer, or a DJ CD player, getting stuck between the junk they sell to people who aren't "pro's" and the over-the-top stuff that costs way too much. It's not that I need to go the cheap route. It's just the idea that if you're willing to pay more then 6 dollars for a shared-host, you must be a developer who eats linux and ruby on rails for breakfast.

u need a prosumer solution dude

In everything I do, I am a total prosumer.

how come Pioneer's only USB CD player costs 700 dollars and won't even play uncompressed Wav files, because it's not for "pros".

how come a letter-sized black and white laser printer costs like 90 bucks but a tabloid-sized one costs 1200?

if yr just installing wp and u can totally do it w/o a control panel btw - its just a matter of dragging a folder from one side of an ftp client to the other

but yah youll prob run into something u want the cp for down the road :/

^ that's true. Linode's a bit more bare bones even than that though: default install comes w/ssh and that's about it. You get the L, the AMP is up to you. xp

of the shared sites, I've read good things about AN Hosting, A Small Orange and Web Faction. Web Faction looks good.

hay dudes pl recommend me a rad word press theme that displays author/date/time info in its own column like these thx

http://i48.tinypic.com/28wnzm.jpg

http://i46.tinypic.com/2epk6zo.jpg

Typepad?

I've been meaning to try squarespace, anybody have any experience

hey so: i am going to start a blog for an i guess association i am a part of. different people should be able to post & it should be as minimal & only-modestly-branded w/the imprimaturs of its developers as is possible. does anybody have effusive recommendations?