[thelist] To blog or not to blog

Simon Dell simondl at epic.co.uk
Wed Feb 6 04:21:02 CST 2002


Hi there evolters!

I'm toying with the idea of starting a blog. Not because I think they're a
good way to communicate using this wonderful new medium we're all
working+playing with, but because I have a huge ego and want to fill the
net with my rants and raves... er.. no. Sorry, that came out wrong. ;-)
Seriously though, I'm thinking of starting a blog as a way of teaching
myself various techniques and technologies. Questions about which OS, which
DB, which server side technology are going to be left to other people
because I'm _intending_ to try out doing the same site 2 or 3 different
ways (php, jsp, .NET probably..) as an intro to all those technologies. The
questions I have are more about methodology, data-structure, paradigm...

Like most blogs or news sites, I'm going to have articles on a number of
topics, and those articles can be submitted by any number of users.
Eventually I'm going to put in content management pages so untrained users
(like my family...) can enter articles. Ideally, I'd like the articles to
links and images, which will require some kind of mark-up to be put into
the stored articles, or some heavy template creation, which is a bit of a
tall order when doing this from scratch for the first time! So I have a
couple of queries:

1) How would you folks go about storing the actual body of the articles? I
can quite easily figure out how to get article meta data stored (dates,
authors, lengths, word counts, number of animals harmed during production
etc..), but too many ideas about how to get content in ran through my head
and I got confused. Should I store HTML in the database tables? Should I
invent some (xml) markup and put that into the DB? Should I put the
articles into XML files and have the DB contain a URL to the file
(transforming on the server)? How would people represent links, insert
images (use limits on number of images? have images as links.. etc etc)?
Should the images be stored in the DB, or paths to their location be stored?

2) If i have a message-board style thing, where people post replies and
comments to articles, should these "responses" count as something different
from the main articles, or are they "articles" themselves?

2) Can anyone point me to a good place to start finding out about users,
authentication, authorisation etc. I'd like people to log in, I'd like
those log-in/pw pairs vaguely secure (though i don't intend for the site to
contain anything i wouldn't mind having copied so it doesn't need to be
ultra-secure).

I realise that the first question is pretty open ended, non-specific and
likely to start holy wars. I'm asking it mainly so as to get a few
responses as pointers for directions to take this in. I'm sure you'll all
reply with different ideas, but if there's a consensus that'd be great. I'm
looking to start fairly simple, but seeing as I've already worked out how
to get plain text in and out of an MS Access (i'm _not_ using that again!!)
I'd like to take things a step or three further.

Sorry for the highly abstract questions, but many thanks in advance to
anyone who replies, and many thanks to Seb who has already given me a
couple of pointers on this.

cheers!
Simon




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