[thelist] To blog or not to blog

[Daniel J. Cody]

I just wanted to +1 pretty much everything Steve has to say here.. This
is *exactly* the way I wrote my weblog to work. Three tables in the
DB(posts, users, comments) and a seperation of content/style(or
whatever) makes it really easy to work with. Mine's writtin in CF, uses
MySQL for the backend, and is available for anyone to use(if you can get
past my shitty coding style ;) and modify.
http://members.evolt.org/djc/stdio is the URL, and drop me a line if
you're interested.

If you're really not looking to get into the whole inner workings of a
weblog, I'd check out GreyMatter. It relies on flat files to work, and
is geared towards being easy to use and modify. My girlfriend, who has
almost zero knowledge of HTML/CSS/whatever has found it fairly easy to
use and get started with.

HTH, shout if you have more questions :)

.djc.

Steve Cook wrote:
> Hi Simon - sounds like a cool project you have set yourself!

> 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.
[snip]
> 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.