Trellix Licenses Blogger 60
I've never cared for the term
"blog,"
but gee, I can't really argue with the idea of a siteful of short newsy items updated several times a day. And everyone seems to agree
Blogger
is a great way to run your own such site, much better than the
crappy alternatives.
As
Dan Bricklin
says, "I didn't like the idea of Blogger being
lost in the dotCom crash.
Personal web sites were growing and important." So he got his company
Trellix
to license it. Go check out his account
"How The Blogger Deal Happened"
(and/or read the
press release).
Re:Blogger nonsense. (Score:1)
Honestly, I think every ONCE and a while, a few people need to at least TRY to grow a sense of humor.
I have used Blogger, and it is a very tech-relevant web app. It has fueled an entire sector of the internet, by giving people who don't know code a chance to still have a semi-dynamic site. Not everyone wants to learn php/asp/perl/whatever to build a simple site.
Up until a week ago my site (http://www.daggerdesign.com/apt317 [daggerdesign.com]) was powered by blogger, and still would be if Blogger would do the other things that I want to be able to do. Since I have a special set of needs, I'm coding my own backend in PHP at the moment.
Next time you think of criticizing the content on slashdot, try to remember that you may not be the target audience, and frankly, most of us don't give a flying f*ck what you want to read.
Those that can't do, criticize.
-dag@daggerdesign.com [mailto]
(yeah, I'm an anonymous coward, I'm not logged in and wanted to rant while it was fresh in my head)
Re:LiveJournal (Score:1)
Re:LiveJournal (Score:1)
--
Blogger is the crappy alternative (Score:1)
Livejournal has source code available (Score:2)
The creator of Livejournal and his team opened up the source [livejournal.com] a short while ago. So, if you don't want to use Blogger that's fine but if you want to use something or install it yourself or help a project built on perl... check out LJ.
I have been using LJ for over a year now. I have tried Blogger as well. I just didn't like the flow of Blogger and I really missed having comments. Comments and a security model are half the fun of Livejournal.
Livejournal let's you see things like stats pages showing how much the site has grown over time. I wonder why /. never had one of these listed? Or did they?
-Jay
Re:Livejournal has source code available (Score:2)
Re:Livejournal has source code available (Score:2)
Re:LiveJournal (Score:2)
Re:Crappy Alternatives (Score:2)
Does anyone use Slash etc. for a personal page? I just started one with PHP-Nuke [phpnuke.org] but it's definitly overkill.
--
LXP (Score:1)
Re:Slashcode is crap? No, kludgy and hard to deplo (Score:2)
Don't discount thatware. I'm still working on it and I'm determined to change the minds of people like you whether Burzi is doing it full time or not.
Re:Crappy Alternatives (Score:1)
---
Re:Blogger critic (Score:2)
[nice things about Blogger, then]
I've been concerned about the service and its future for some time, not without good reason. The company, Pyra, has itself seen very hard times, and last I knew was down to one employee, its president (evhead). This is largely because they've been unable to figure out how to make this thing make money. And if it's not viable, it will cease to be useful.
Note that this Trellix deal, which is the kind of thing they'd been pursuing last year without success, marks a significant turn for the better. Licensing fees from Trellix will underwrite Blogger's main service, as well as Pyra's development efforts. Pyra has already hired a second employee again.
Personally, I've found stablity and security to be a big problem with this service. It has had major problems with downtime
Major is debatable. There have been a couple of hours-long outages, to be sure, but that happens even with major, well-funded services [hotmail.com].
because of the immense scalability it must endure--users * # of posts, with both increasing. Also, from looking at its errors it seems sort of programming-error prone--direct calls to SQL Server thru ODBC, no parameter checking, that sort of thing.
The only "errors" I've encoutnered -- apart from some difficulties with FTP posts way back in 1999, when they were still tweaking the service -- is the log file overflow problem. Evan finally fixed that on all servers last week.
Well, there is an issue with archive indexes. That's still a sore point with some users. But it's not a deal-breaker for most.
And worst of all, it seems to store (though it is an option) people's usernames/passwords to their ISP accounts, making the site a major cracking target. If I were them I'd be very concerned about the liability of holding people's passwords in plaintext in a database.
Note that the SQL server is behind a firewall, and only communicates with the Java Pyra client. There's a security issue there, to be sure, but it's handled here as well as at any e-commerce site. Besides, if you're concerned, you can always put your weblog up on a free service with its own password, or set up (as I can) a password with access only for Blogger. Just as with any security problem, this can be managed.
And though I very much respect the cult that has built around it, without solid answers to the problems of income, operating stability and security, people are setting themselves up for disappointment.
Did you READ the news release?
Sorry to be a sour puss. I do wish Blogger success, but think they have set out a hard road for themselves.
It's April, not February. You're reacting to the last bad news, not the recent good news. Catch up.
Even so, in the end, it's just a simple publishing service. I love using it, and it would be a chore to change over (one reason I haven't), but it wouldn't kill me if it went away.
----
lake effect [lakefx.nu] weblog
Re:that's what's wrong with blogger and the like (Score:2)
Trellix has been around quite awhile -- ten years, I think. Maybe they will get bought eventually, but most weblogs have a pretty short lifespan, it seems. It's probably "good enough" for almost everyone.
The kind of freedom you're talking about comes at a price. Not everybody wants to be a programmer.
Note that by posting to Slashdot, you're creating content that allows a business you don't own to make money, and that content is stored on a server you don't control, and it could go away at any time. Likely? Maybe no, but think a moment. There's a difference in complexity, but not in principle.
I think it's better to put personal data on your personal site, with a company you have a paying relationship with, that provides a commodity service. Those companies tend to stay in business, and if they don't, you can always switch to a different one. Yes, you may have to download a PHP script or use a web editor.
Note that Blogger output is on your personal site unless you're using blogspot.com [blogspot.com]. If Blogger goes away, you won't be able to edit anything in the Blogger app anymore -- but all your ba
----
lake effect [lakefx.nu] weblog
This is a Good Thing (tm). (Score:3)
Meanwhile, the most popular and easiest-to-use weblog-software gets an even bigger audience, through Trellix partners such as About and Tripod. Soon people at those services will have something like a checkbox option to start a blog; won't that be an explosion! This will lead to competitive pressure for other services like Geocities to offer something similar.
For those of you too young to remember, Dan Bricklin of Trellix is one of the original independent software developers [digitalcentury.com], from back in the 1980s. His first major product, Visicalc [bricklin.com], basically invented the spreadsheet [about.com] program concept from scratch. [You can even download an MS-DOS executable [bricklin.com]!] Maybe someone else would have had the idea of putting a paper spreadsheet on the screen and letting you enter not only numbers but equations, but he was the first, and it revolutionized the PC industry. Later he was responsible for Dan Bricklin's Demo (a quick way to mock-up several screens of potential software for clients, sort of a mix of Powerpoint and Flash in its day -- and still sold as Demo-It!), and then Trellix, which was ahead of its time as a templating engine. Templates are all the rage now, but they weren't an obvious next way to go a few years back.
And basically it shows what kind of a guy Bricklin is; his company could easily have jealously set out to clone Blogger instead, but he saw an existing userbase and brand and also saw a way to redeem karma points (you know, the OLD kind of karma points, the kind that accumulate until you die) by saving a company roughly the way that Lotus (in those days the #2 or #3 commercial software vendor) saved HIS company way back when.
Blogger is certainly limited in some ways. It's dead simple, which makes it easy to set up for your grandma, and it offers online posting from almost anywhere. But it doesn't have discussions (said to be in unreleased Blogger Pro [dashes.com]) and it doesn't let you do anything outside the blog format, so you can't use it to manage your entire site. And if you're at
I started out with Blogger (I was one of the first users), and though I've been working with a couple of the more comprehensive products behind the scenes, for other purposes, I still do my weblog with Blogger. There's just no reason to change. And now with the Trellix investment, I don't have to worry about Pyra doing the fish-on-the-beach thing.
Just remember that not everyone is interested in -- or capable of -- hacking code just to post their thoughts every day. If you want to play with code, and I have no problem believing that's true of most Slashdotters, Blogger may not be right for you. But it's probably right for a lot of people.
----
lake effect [lakefx.nu] weblog
Re:Blog is a beverage (Score:1)
In '86 we got into something a lot weirder than Blog. I was still technically too young, but it didn't matter as much then.
Blog is a beverage (Score:2)
Re:Blog is a beverage (Score:2)
You are correct, sir! [www.pihl.cc] I didn't actually partake of any at this year's Minicon [mnstf.org], I'm told it was present in limited quantities.
Chelloveck
Re:LiveJournal (Score:2)
Kevin Fox
--
Crappy Alternatives (Score:3)
Slashcode needs it's own server - not everyone has that. Blogger is far easier if you just run a small website ... and I don't think the Blogger-code is free anyway.
Better than a weblog (Score:1)
Well, it's really an alternative to our democratic processes, but to be applied to petition/constitution/laws/rules/novels/newspaper writing.
It's a mix of participative and representative democracy. With it, everyone can propose elements of texts, can moderate up or down, can delegate their moderation to someone else (delegations are transitive, which mean that person can also delegate for that element).
I'm looking for some group of persons willing to install and test drive it: VeniVidiVoti Library [sourceforge.net]
Blogger (Score:2)
Re:LiveJournal (Score:2)
Re:Slashcode is crap? No, kludgy and hard to deplo (Score:2)
INITIALIZE ALL VARIABLES AND EXAMINE ALL QUERY DATA IN PHP!!! ALWAYS!!! THIS GOES FOR ALL CGI!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Re:Blogger nonsense. (Score:1)
There is nothing at all simple about building a dynamic site. Or to respond properly to your assertion, dynamic sites really don't fall into the category of "simple".
Re:Livejournal has source code available (Score:1)
--
OliverWillis.Com [oliverwillis.com]
Re:Livejournal has source code available (Score:1)
--
Re:Crappy Alternatives (Score:1)
Thanks much
My tally so far? (Score:1)
I think the time it takes for stories to be posted on the main page is taking longer and longer to the detriment of slashdot as a whole. Then again, mefi could just be a better meta news site...
Re:Blogger... better? (Score:1)
> like pyra.bak scattered all over your directory. It's really good at pooping files
> everywhere.
Eh? The only files Blogger uploads are the blogs themselves, saved as
It's exceedingly simple to figure out Blogger tags, if you have half a brain and the inclination to go through the really short and simply written documentation, which is easy to find.
http://cheesedip.com [cheesedip.com]
Re:LiveJournal (Score:1)
LiveJournal (Score:2)
blogger (Score:1)
Re:LiveJournal (Score:1)
The problem with LiveJournal is that it leaves you too dependent on LiveJournal itself. If Blogger goes down I still have my page on my own site, and can post to it by hand. If LiveJournal goes down or closes up shop, then pfft! the page is gone.
Really, I'd like something I can have full control over, but it'd have to be CGI where I'm at. There just isn't a good, modern CGI solution that I can find. I fiddle around with writing my own, but I am inherently lazy and perpetually unfocused.
Blogger is true /. Material (Score:1)
For those of us a little more patient and a little less technical Blogger is a perfect way for to create content as we surf the web.
Sure it's not perfect, but when it works it works well. I can post quickly when I discover something worth mentioning, and I have a complete archive on the site.
Whatever the net was, and whatever it will be, Blogger lies somewhere in between...
www.bodymix.net [bodymix.net]
remixing reality
Security Concerns (Score:1)
The problem that I have with blogger is that you need to give them your FTP password. That makes me more than a little nervous. What if their site is cracked?
Re:Crappy Alternatives (Score:2)
Slashcode is crap? No, kludgy and hard to deploy. (Score:1)
I spent 4 months of HELL trying to get SLASH to work, and then got turned on to PHP-Nuke by the company which was hosting my SLASH site. I had my PHP-Nuke site up and running in TWO DAYS.
Yeah, there were a few holes which I had to tell the hosting company to patch, but other than that PHP-Nuke is the simplicity and functionality leader for discussion sites. Yeah, it's still a little slow on the scalability front, but Francisco is busy changing that.
If you want to create a news-discussion site, try PHP-Nuke first. You'll like it.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/
Not all alternatives suck. (Score:2)
I can't speak for LiveJournal, since I've never used it. After getting burned by a service that didn't actually reside on my server, I got pointed to Greymatter [noahgrey.com]. It's a set of perl scripts (available for free but the creator takes donations) that you install on your own server (bonus) and provide unbelievably configurable output (major bonus) .
It's not for everyone - a lot of the weblogging crowd isn't real interested in the code that creates their pages; in that case, they need to stick with something that won't make them have to worry about the underlying code of their site.
But if, like me, you know exactly how you want your site to look and function, and just need a way to make it easier to craft posts on a daily basis, GM's the way to go. I can't imagine going back to a service whose scripts don't even reside on my own server.
(Not to mention the user interface is quite nice, and doesn't use a ton of frames like Blogger does.)
Re:Security Concerns (Score:1)
Re:Slashcode is crap? No, kludgy and hard to deplo (Score:1)
phpnuke is good for some things... but following the migration pattern can be painful if you customize the code much (which seems like a neccessity)... phpnuke.org has a beta of their 5.x code that looks pretty neat... but I wonder if it'll be painful to migrate too...
Keep up the good work with thatware...
E.
dan "the man" bricklin (Score:2)
Visicalc, trellix and his general writings and his opinions are important as software history and his other general writings all have interesting things in them that everyone can learn from.
plus he's a cool guy. /. should think about him as the next interview.
of course i'm biased because he went to my high school [akibahebrewacademy.com] and his mom taught me 6th grade science and didn't punish me when i punched that 7th grader out...but that's another thing.
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Pointer to source (Score:3)
http://www.livejournal.com/files/code/ [livejournal.com]
Re:Other products? (Score:1)
Blogger's really a single-thread posting system, not even a threaded discussion or messaging system. The nice thing about it is just how simple it is. Though you can format your output page, it is completely incomparable to an environment like BroadVision and Vignette, which allows for all sorts of extended programming and content management.
Also, Blogger is hardly a product. My personal opinion is that they should have made the code free for installation, and yet continue their service for those that didn't want to/couldn't install the software. That would buy down their scalability problems a bit, give others a chance to hack at their dubious code, and also set up the possibility to sell it as a product into intranets. As a proprietary service, they'll forever be stuck with scalability and security concerns.
Productizing Blogger would also make it available to corporate intranets, which can't/shouldn't really use blogger because its security is so hazy.
Re:This is a Good Thing (tm). (Score:1)
This is good because it ensures the long-term survival of Blogger.
Hm. A company taking on a charity case doesn't ensure long-term survival. They still have to overcome their current obstacles. Don't get me wrong--I think it's great that its life has been extended, but only because it keeps the market aware of this kind of service. Other services like MSN & co. will realize that they can make a better Blogger, and do so. Users win!
Blogger critic (Score:2)
I think it's great that it's opened up the publishing aspect of the web to many people; that seems wonderful. But I've been concerned about the service and its future for some time, not without good reason.
The company, Pyra, has itself seen very hard times, and last I knew was down to one employee, its president (evhead). This is largely because they've been unable to figure out how to make this thing make money. And if it's not viable, it will cease to be useful.
Personally, I've found stablity and security to be a big problem with this service. It has had major problems with downtime because of the immense scalability it must endure--users * # of posts, with both increasing. Also, from looking at its errors it seems sort of programming-error prone--direct calls to SQL Server thru ODBC, no parameter checking, that sort of thing. And worst of all, it seems to store (though it is an option) people's usernames/passwords to their ISP accounts, making the site a major cracking target. If I were them I'd be very concerned about the liability of holding people's passwords in plaintext in a database.
And though I very much respect the cult that has built around it, without solid answers to the problems of income, operating stability and security, people are setting themselves up for disappointment.
Sorry to be a sour puss. I do wish Blogger success, but think they have set out a hard road for themselves.
a free weblog: editthispage.com (Score:1)
Haven't used it myself.
Hey Thanks! (Score:1)
Re:Blogger is the crappy alternative (Score:1)
Other products? (Score:1)
Can some with some hands-on experience with these things explain the difference between them and the super-high priced content management systems like Broadvision and Vignette?
-----------------
Re:Slashcode is crap? No, kludgy and hard to deplo (Score:1)
that's what's wrong with blogger and the like (Score:1)
I think it's better to put personal data on your personal site, with a company you have a paying relationship with, that provides a commodity service. Those companies tend to stay in business, and if they don't, you can always switch to a different one. Yes, you may have to download a PHP script [zend.com] or use a web editor.
Re:that's what's wrong with blogger and the like (Score:1)
That doesn't change things much (yes, I had actually looked at the site). If the service goes away and you don't have any alternatives, you are still stuck. And those alternatives will only exist if there is demand for people to run web applications at their own hosting services. (It also raises all sorts of concerns about security and your terms of service with your web hosting company.)
The kind of freedom you're talking about comes at a price. Not everybody wants to be a programmer.
You don't have to be a programmer to install a web page editor on your machine or to install a web application on a well-run hosting service.
Note that by posting to Slashdot, you're creating content that allows a business you don't own to make money
I have no problem with people making money, Blogger, Trellix, or otherwise.
Thank God (Score:1)
m.kelley
www.mkelley.net
I can't believe you lot (Score:1)
I have more respect for the people making the 'crappy alternatives' than I do the people complaining about them.
Re:fp (Score:1)
(ps. sorry, Choco-man, for not believing you - but I'm very untrusting of people who post in all caps :))
Blogger... better? (Score:1)
Blogger was also horrible at keeping track of archives and I suppose it's better if you like having literally dozens of little files named stuff like pyra.bak scattered all over your directory. It's really good at pooping files everywhere.
You can embed LiveJournal [livejournal.com] into your own website as well and it's WAY easier to update. All you need to do is go to the website or go here [livejournal.com] and download a client for your operating system. Yes, there's an OPEN SOURCE Linux client as well. *grin*
As far as Blogger sucking because its source isn't open.. I don't quite get that, but to each his own. Not every closed source project sucks. But for those of you that are concerned, LiveJournal's source code is open source now, and I believe the clients are as well.
There's even a MacOS X client.
Re:Blogger... better? (Score:1)
Re:Blogger... better? (Score:1)
blogger.html blogger.html.pyra blogger.html.pyrabak
In the "archive" directory I created, there's no less than 28 files with a
Obviously they've changed it a bit, because when I used it, it was a confusing pain in the ass and yes, it did scatter files everywhere.
Re:This is /. Material? (Score:1)
>infects house with fleas.
That's not news for nerds. That's not stuff that matters.