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October 16, 2006
The World Needs Another Blogging Tool
As a veteran of the blogging tool wars -- heck, one of the first blogging tool vendors -- I never thought I'd say this, but ... the world needs a new blogging tool. Bill Gerrard at StrayPackets has convinced me. SixApart's MovableType's cumbersome legacy code prevents it from being all that it could be, and Matt & Toni at WordPress could use the competition (and they don't have it all figured out either -- yet!).So, that’s my prescription for SixApart: Morph Movable Type into a self-hosted product that couples the ease of TypePad with the easy design configurability of, at least, DreamWeaver. Better yet, look at a Mac product like RapidWeaver.While they’re at it, make it transparently scalable, Eliminate comment and trackback spam, even if that means hosting comments on SixApart’s own servers. Give users built-in stats. Let them ban abusive hosts and referrers with one click.
Bloggers have needs that WordPress doesn’t meet. Meet them. Bloggers have problems that WordPress doesn’t fix. Fix them.
If you add in pluggable advertising network management, I'd fund that product.
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Maybe we should take a copy of Movable Type and create our own hosted service on their product. Possibly have the different products that users could leverage in a hosted manner.
We could create an organization that would have these hosted services.
More diversity and competition is a good thing, though I should point out that wordpress.com already has almost every feature on that list: it scales transparently, eliminates 99.99% of spam, has great built-in stats, and let's users block spammers and splogs. All for free. And people are working on the ad network mgmt (http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Advertisement) and drag and drop UI editing (http://www.freshpursuits.com/canvas/) pieces.
Paul - Leaving my last comment I noticed that you are moderating your comments. If that's because of spam, you should try Akismet (it's available for MT: http://akismet.com/blog/2006/04/for-mt/).
Paul, you've just chummed the waters :P Expect folks building half-baked "blogging" tools to come banging on your door...
There are other options, though I agree none are user friendly enough for the mass market, and none asnwer all of our needs. In particular from the composition angle I have issues with the blog editors out there, and all the problems one can have with formatting (html) text, which can be really complicted for new users.
Here are some alternatives:
Drupal - www.drupal.org
Typo - http://typosphere.org/
Simplelog - http://simplelog.net/
And then theres a bunch of content managements systems like joomla, mambo (see http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ for a more extensive list)
I'm in the process of investigating Django, a Python-based Web framework that's behind several newspaper sites. It's not quite cooked (version 0.95) and there's no out-of-the-box blog setup, but it seems to provide a strong foundation for creating a custom blog with very little code.
Here's an example with a very clean look: Domaki; there are plenty of others listed on the Django site.
I agree.
As blogging is becoming more and more mainstream, I think there is room for multiple tools (just like we have for other publishing technologies that came earlier).
A power-blogger like you likely needs a different tool than someone just getting a personal blog started and will write maybe once every month or so.