[WEB4LIB] Re: Blog: Open source vs. commercial

[K.G. Schneider]

If you don't have the resources to install and maintain blogging software,
and I know that describes some librarians reading Web4Lib, Typepad is a very
good solution. For $150 a year, and what you get for it, it's dirt cheap,
nice-looking, full-featured, and eliminates the fiddle factor.  

If fiddling is important to you, or you need other features, consider
Wordpress; a bunch of us recently evaluated it for LITA's forthcoming blog
and it was our top choice. It doesn't have that ponderous rebuilding problem
that creeps into Movable Type when the blog gets bigger, and it's natively
strong at user management, far better than Movable Type (for which you can
buy a separate workflow for the ridiculously bloated price of $250), which
is important if you delegate some content creation or have tiers of
publishing permissions, as may be likely in a library. I haven't seen
earlier versions but the version of Wordpress I saw was fairly polished. I
even installed a Wordpress blog on my own site, just to play with it, and
liked what I saw. 

However, Wordpress has a peeve that as a blogger I find a killer,
particularly since I have a Workflow of One. For its RSS 2 feeds, Wordpress
natively provides the post comments as a separate feed from the post itself.
Movable Type handles that far more elegantly, allowing RSS2 subscribers to
see comments on the post itself in their aggregators. I'm sure there's a way
around that... or pretty sure... but I track some Wordpress blogs and
haven't seen one that has addressed the problem. The comments coming in
separately look silly... like, what IS this comment about? If the comments
could at least reference the post, they'd make some sense, but far better is
when the comments are UNDER the post, which makes the discussion look like
what it is, a thread. (Note: always subscribe to your own blog in all
flavors it offers.) 

If you aren't enabling comments (or you don't mind that your readers'
comments flutter in randomly, with a "someone left a cake out in the rain"
feeling to the discussions), Wordpress is pretty good right out of the box.
If someone has a fix for that comment issue, do tell. 

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com