TOPIC: TRACKBACK
Technical considerations regarding the discussion aspect of blogging
18th July 2008
When making a start in the world of blogging, there are so many things to consider that you almost need a trial run first to learn the lingo. In fact, getting up to speed by using a service like that offered by Blogger or WordPress.com seems a very sensible starting point. Even so, the business is like building a house in that you only really know what you are doing after you have done the deed and made all the mistakes. That is particularly true when you go down the self-administered blog route. For starters, it's so easy to pick the wrong domain name or hosting provider. Selecting your blogging software is the next step, but that may not be so tricky; WordPress does a reasonable job and there's always Movable Type, Expression Engine, Drupal (yes, really) or Habari.
That mention of blogging software brings me to something that I encountered recently: commenting functionality. I am coming around to the idea that this is probably something that needs to be considered up front because of the nature of blogging. The Blog Herald's regular readers should understand blogging conversations; consequently, the technology must be easy for visitors to use and simple for bloggers to administer. However, the two can collide. For one thing, there are a myriad of choices available to the blogger, while the blight of comment spam is ever pervasive and growing.
When it comes to comment spam, it is best to realise that there are two sources of responses to a blog post: visitor comments or trackbacks (pingbacks?) from other blogs. As it happens, I reckon that the latter is probably the channel where most of the detritus travels, with various anti-spam solutions are on offer to curb its spread. Names from the WordPress world like Akismet, Spam Karma, Simple TrackBack Validation and Bad Behaviour come to mind. The former can also be used, particularly when the unscrupulous make use of low-cost labour in low-cost countries, and that's when the thorny questions of user registration and CAPTCHA's arise. There is something to be said for not going to extremes with these and just sticking with less onerous rules and filtering on the server side.
Admittedly, I have stumbled into forcing visitors to register before adding a comment and then making them log in thereafter. While I think that it's for security reasons, WordPress creates a password and then sends it to the person who is registering rather than displaying it on a web page. That can create another problem: what happens if the email fails to arrive? In the last week, this has happened with a visitor to my hillwalking blog.
There could be a number of reasons for the non-arrival of the relevant email. One is ironic: being an automated email, it gets stuck in the spam filters of the recipient's mailbox and so never gets to them. It could also be a bug with WordPress itself (I have raised a ticket, and I am awaiting what Automattic might have to say to it) or a consequence of some setting made by a hosting provider. All of that makes it challenging to track down the cause of the issue, yet it kicks off other thoughts as to its resolution. One is to remove the needed for registration and logging in the first place, but there are third-party services that may help too; the former has turned out to be the case for this place. Since it seems to be performing well enough, it is an acceptable option.
When it comes to using third-party comment handling systems, what needs to be considered is how well they work with your blog. For instance, I gave Disqus a quick whirl and soon realised that I needed to update the themes for my WordPress blogs if I were to use it on an ongoing basis. While it worked fine, I was left wondering if it would have been better to have brought it in when I started a blog rather than part way through and with comments made using the existing WordPress functionality. Intense Debate is another option, one of many if my hunch is right. The theme for my hillwalking blog has been modified to allow prospective commenters to get in touch with me if they are having problems. That is only an interim approach while I consider what the way forward will be.
Alternatives to WordPress
26th February 2008Movable Type was the leading blogging platform before Six Apart disappointed their users with their licensing and WordPress came into being. Now that WordPress would seem to be king of the hill, it's tempting to conclude that there's nothing else out there for those wanting a self-hosted blog. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
These days, Movable Type is available as an open source entity and I have been giving it a quick whirl. Importing from a WordPress export file is very swish and a quick spot of tinkering gets you a running in no time. Getting the thing set up can be a little confusing because the processing is done by CGI scripts, and they need to live in your website's cgi-bin directory while the actual blog is instantiated in another location. Aside from that complexity, things are not that off-putting, and the style of the administration and content management dashboard could show WordPress a thing or two. It's partitioning of trackbacks from comments is another useful feature in this world pervaded by comment spam.
Habari is another option that I have encountered, and it seems like early days for this one. The first impression that struck me was its minimalist feel, but it will do most of what you ask of it when it comes to blogging. Nevertheless, importing and exporting is one area that needs more development and its handling of themes is a matter that warrants more exploration on my part. In summary, it seems to offer most of your needs, even if there is nothing to make it stand out from the crowd at this time.
I encountered another alternative platform in the pages of PC Plus called Expression Engine. It is commercial software, yet there is a free cut down version available without some of the modules. There is a bit more to the offering than blogging, but you have to buy it to get features like wikis, forums and the like. As it happens, the blogging capability in the free version is creditable, and it appears that you can manage multiple blogs through the same interface, a feature that has potential when it comes to using the software as a kind of CMS. It cannot directly import from WordPress, but a Movable Type export file is accepted without a bother. Regarding changing the look and feel of the blog, I found that editing the index and stylesheet files through the administration interface produced good results quite easily and quickly. Maybe creating a new theme might be a worthwhile project to see how one can make a blog's appearance fall into line with the other parts of a website. After all, Ellis Labs claims that the software should work the way that you do.
I only have done a quick spot of fiddling with any of the above, but there is potential for further investigations to see what else they have to offer. I am sure that there are other alternatives and the CMS Drupal comes to mind for its having a blogging module, even if I didn't find the main CMS functionality to be sufficiently flexible for my needs when I last tried it (a new version made it appearance recently); overly complex CSS was one bugbear for me. Even with all the possibilities, I won't be spending too much of my time exploring this area. Suffice it to say, it's not a completely WordPress world...