GENIUS FORUMS

I was wondering if any techie people here could recommend some blogging software? I got this new website and I want to put a blog on the front page, but I would like some advanced features like the ability to categorize the posts topically as well as some way to nest comment replies, like they do on digg.com.

I would actually like to write my own software that's more reminiscent of using the Netscape Communicator software for Usenet, except for the opening post of each thread would be the blog entry and then the replies would be graphically displayed underneath it and when you click on one a new window would pop open for it. A new window would open to write a reply, too. I would want it to work just like Netscape did. I think it would encourage more thoughtful replies if it seemed like more of a big deal than just having a text box at the bottom of the page with a submit button. I don't know, maybe it wouldn't work like that nowadays since nobody is familiar with Usenet anymore and would reject the whole idea as a PITA.

Last I checked everyone was using wordpress. Making your own would take tons of work so I wouldn't suggest it unless this is going to be a major site.

Wordpress is the fairly obvious choice as remarked above. Some more possibilities could be achieved with Movable Type (Perl based), which is maintained by the same people who own/operate TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox, all fairly usable hosted solutions but involve more 'community' orientation.

Are there any Wordpress sites you guys think are particularly good that I could check out?

You could download and install it on your own site if you have that possibility with your hosting account. Some hosts have it already prepared, check http://wordpress.org/hosting/ for good places that offer it in this manner, or at least a couple in that list I know are good to use.

Also at http://wordpress.com you could get one hosted for you.

I know, but I wanted to see what it's capable of before I start messing around with it cluelessly, that's all. My provider makes it available through Fantastico or whatever.

Textpattern is also open source (php I think), but I don't know much about its features. Their discussion forum might be helpful.

Thanks, I'll take a gander.

Matt Gregory wrote:I know, but I wanted to see what it's capable of before I start messing around with it cluelessly, that's all. My provider makes it available through Fantastico or whatever.

Oh, okay, I misunderstood. My own method of getting to know things is to mess around with it clueless :)

Still I'd like to add that to worry too much about how to present your blog and comment section is not really in the spirit of blogs. The idea is to let the blog-software provide RSS or XML links to the content and let people subscribe to your blog and comment section for example with readers like Bloglines, or other local readers (much like newsgroups indeed). This way they have control over how they want to read you or pop-ups for comments and so on. So the content is separated from style and no need to worry about Usenet familiarity from anyone. To decide how all people will view your blog is back to 'old style' content generation and certainly not in the spirit of Usenet, or the blogosphere for that matter.

Thanks for the advice. I admit that I don't really know much about the blogosphere, but from what I've seen of RSS and all that jazz, it seems to me that the point of it is to make surfing the web faster and more efficient, to mitigate the fear of getting caught surfing the web at work. It's nifty but other than that, I don't see the point of it. I guess I don't understand it.

All I'm aiming for is some software that makes having conversations in a community environment easier. I haven't seen anything particularly impressive, but digg.com is the best I've seen so far. You can actually see the flow of conversation on there, although I don't like how the deeper the conversation gets, the less screen space you have for the replies. On this site, it would be nice if you could temporarily filter out posts in a thread so you can concentrate on one conversation between two people. I imagine you could set it up so that you could just click on two names to set the filter. If PhpBB stored the replied-to post with each reply then that would make it more accurate. I think that's the main thing that's missing from blog comments is the information about the conversation flow. I don't see how an RSS aggregator can fix that problem, unless it used heuristic text searching to figure out who is replying to who. Do you by chance know of an aggregator that can show flat comments in threaded form?

Okay, yeah I'm still more a BBS guy myself. I like to know all Web developments and so I follow the hypes from a safe distance.

The threaded view is interesting although some developers and users hate it because, as they claim, the flow of many conversations is not very topical and structured by default and threads are then seen as disruptive. One could argue of course that a more calm, organized discussion is disrupted by lack of structure :)

Anyway, I've seen the threaded view on some CMS modules but the only pure blog system I've seen is Livejournal which has the added community aspect of getting regular new visitors with similar interests from 'around the block'. A bit like ezboard used to work.

One example of a threaded LJ view is here.

Diebert,

Okay, yeah I'm still more a BBS guy myself. I like to know all Web developments and so I follow the hypes from a safe distance.

What do you do? Are you a web developer?

The threaded view is interesting although some developers and users hate it because, as they claim, the flow of many conversations is not very topical and structured by default and threads are then seen as disruptive. One could argue of course that a more calm, organized discussion is disrupted by lack of structure :)

I think if you could come up with a good threaded view, then it would be easy to offer both alternatives.

Anyway, I've seen the threaded view on some CMS modules but the only pure blog system I've seen is Livejournal which has the added community aspect of getting regular new visitors with similar interests from 'around the block'. A bit like ezboard used to work.

One example of a threaded LJ view is here.

That's pretty good actually, but I really have a hankering to take threading to the next level. I think if you had a page with a graph of the thread on it, where each post is represented by a small avatar to indicate the poster, and load all the posts into memory when the page is loaded, then that would give you a graphical representation and pretty fast access to the posts. You could just click on an avatar and the post would pop up in a floating division. Then as a bonus you could click on one post, hold down the shift key and click on another post, and then that would cause the graph to be traversed and all the posts in between would be brought up in the window, so you could see an entire conversation at once, or a contiguous excerpt of it. I think this is all possible with current web technology, isn't it?

Ah! Look what I found:

http://www.poweredbywp.com/