Tour de Blog

As much as I enjoy blogging through JRoller, I thought I’d spend the month of April taking other blogging systems for a spin. I’ll let each trial run for a week, but to keep it sane, I’ll continue to archive each blog to the JRoller page.

First in line is Simple PHP Blog. This isn’t a blogging site, like JRoller, Blogger, or 360. It’s a PHP script that a can be installed on a conventional server for a single user.

Installing Simple PHP Blog is, well, simple. Upload the script, set the permissions, and run the index.php. With FileZilla, it can all be done using drag, drop, and click.

Since SPB is intended for people with server access, there isn’t an editing feature for the themes. But, if you were able to install SPB, it’s not any harder to edit the file and drop it onto the server. In practice, it’s no different than editing a Roller theme.

One nice feature is the sidebar text box widget. To get an “About Me” blurb into JRoller, I had to edit the theme. With SPB, I could just add a text box through the configuration menu that comes up in the sidebar. On the website, the developer is testing a new widget feature, to make it easier to add other customizations to the sidebar.

One nice thing for me is that SPB generates arbitrary permalinks IDs. JRoller used a hash of the name, which induced me to use my own hash for the title, save the entry, and then change the title to be human-friendly.

SPB uses a BBS code markup for the entries and comments. Instead of using HTML tags like , we use pidgin tags like [url=][/url]. There’s a wizard for building the tags, but once you’ve seen an example, they are just as easy to create by hand.

Eventually, I’ll probably do a feature grid. For now, it seems like SPB has rounded up all the “usual suspect” features, at least in the context of a single-user blog installed on your own server. The next question will be whether my server is any more reliable than JRoller’s :)

To access the blog system of the week, follow the http://husted.com/ted/blog/index.html. Feel free to re-up for the feed, so as to give each system a fair test. Of course, if anyone has a preference or other feedback, feel free to comment.