[thelist] To blog or not to blog

[Steve Cook]

Hi Simon - sounds like a cool project you have set yourself!

After using Blogger for over a year I decided to do much the same thing as
you are now starting. My requirements were somewhat different, but a bunch
of things are similar.
	PHP & MySQL
	Simple blog structure (entering an entry should be a no-brainer)
	Single user
	Historic archive
	Search function
	Ability to add images and catalogue them in a gallery
	Possibility to "categorise" blog posts so they build a menu-based
website as well as a blog! (This led to my tool's name - Clogger - (Category
Blogger))

(You can see the results in action at http://www.cookstour.org/ )

It was the last point that particularly interested me and which I felt made
it worthwhile creating my own tool, while I was using Blogger, it was pretty
much the only part of my site I was updating, so I thought that it would
make sense to combine a blogging tool with a mini CMS and run the whole site
from the blog.

To facilitate simple updating of the blog (which I think is one of the
primary attractions of the blog format - you can simply log in and fire off
an entry), I kept the structure as simple as possible. My blog entries are
simply text fields in MySQL. Any HTML formatting I do by hand in the entry.
I also avoided creating a title field or anything similar - ehen presenting
search or archive results I present the first 100 characters (or so) of the
entry.

At its simplest, my data structure is a category table which contains an ID,
a title, a description, a parent an order (which order in the list of
categories) and a user ID. From that I can create a navigation. Then I have
a table for posts which contains an ID, a date submitted, the post text, a
notation of how it was submitted (I have a web and a WAP interface) and a
user ID. There's then a simple relation table linking posts to one or more
categories.

On top of that there's a gallery table and a gallery relation table. Finally
I have a simple table to store information that I have in the sidebars on my
site, but that's not really integral in Clogger itself.

You'll see that while I use this as a single user tool, I have built in
support at least at the database level for multiple users. It should
probably have a separate field so that multiple clogs (heh!) could be run
against the same database.

I would question whether anything more complex than this is needed for a
blogging tool that gets average usage (within 1 family say). If you want som
HTML formatting tools, then I would consider doing them in a similar wat to
Blogger with client-side script and then storing the complete HTML in the
text field.

Finally, I've been considering opening the source for Clogger and making it
available (I have clogger.org though it's having some DNS problems right now
and there's nothing there yet anyway). If you are suitably interested it
might be the kick I need to get a clean version of the code together (it's
almost there, I need to strip out formatting and db info basically) and
available. I even wrote a DB filter to make it easier to intagrate against
different database engines.

I hope this is some help - it's helped pique my interest in my project
again!

.steve

----------------------------------
   WapWarp - http://wapwarp.com
 Wap-Dev - http://www.wap-dev.net
 Cookstour - http://cookstour.org
----------------------------------

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Dell [mailto:simondl at epic.co.uk]
> Sent: den 6 februari 2002 11:19
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: [thelist] To blog or not to blog
>
><SNIP>
> 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...
> </SNIP>