As I noted below, I’m looking for help and/or feedback on designing my own blog software that will eventually be offered (for free - open source) to the public.
This is for you non-technical people out there as well! I’m still looking for general suggestions on features you’d need or want in a blog system, as well as more specific suggestions on things like a name for the system. Also, once there is a name established, I’ll be looking for a logo (that’s for you artists out there) . The only caveat is that you won’t receive any payment for anything you contribute, other than an entry in the “credits” indicating your participation in the project and what you provided.
Thanks.
One Trackback
Been a while
Just to let you know I am alive, I have been talking a lot about OS X on Jareds blog.
Read it all here.
Also Jared is creating a new blogging sytem, you can find all the posts here. I am really excited about it.
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All I can offer is a potential name that you might be sick of hearing.
Later I want to give out tagboards and comment systems for free through freespeek, but it doesnt look to good since I dont have that much control or knowledge of coding and making a superior product then whats already free.
So, if you want to call it freespeek you could do that and I could host the pages and files.
Everything that I would want is in wordpress and kubrick, other then some extensions that should be built in, like spam filtering, gallery, post via email, rss, and so on. I am very interested in what you are planning.
Cool. I have mixed feelings about the freespeek name; I like the concept behind it, but I’m not too into “alternate” spellings, and the main “freespeak” domains are already registered. But since you’ve inspired me in that direction, how about “FreePress”? Same concept, but more specific to the publishing arena. In anticipation, I just went out and registered freepressblog.com and .org, so maybe that’s what it will be….
Re: Kubrick - It is another template system for Wordpress, right? Does it include any functionality that WP doesn’t already have? I do need to add spam filtering and e-mail posting to the requirements list, and I think I already have rss and gallery in there. Thanks for the feedback.
I’ll definitely include you as part of the “project team”, to get your feedback, ideas, and testing, etc. as it goes along. Just let me know what you want your title to be in the credits… and you can put it in your resume too.
I use trackback, at first it didnt make any sense but it really does.
Say you read an article on another blog and instead of making your views solely on their blog thorugh a comment you can post on your own blog, and it will trackback to the original blog.
For example, Jared wrote a great post a while back and instead of comenting on it here I quoted him and wrote about it on my site. I included a trackback and under Jared’s coments was a trackback to my site and the post I referenced.
I do it mainly because it brings new readers from those other blogs to my site to see what else I have to say. It really makes a “community” from blogging and as the web goes it just “links” everyone together a little bit better. Making 6 degrees of seperation a little easier.
Sorry, if it still does not make sense to you or give you a good reason to use it but I think its an assett to a lot of bloggers.
OK, I might play around with it. It seems like one of those things that probably isn’t too hard to do, and if it’s expected to be a standard part of blog software, I should probably include it whether I like it or not.
Thanks.
Kubrick is just a template but I think it is for other sytems also. Kubrick is really nice because it gives WP a whole new feel, since it includes a new index. I just think you need to look at the Kubrick template because the code that he included is packed full of all the features that you can either include or hide. This is a nice feature because normally a non coder would have to search for the right code to insert.
I was thinking of freepress for you also but it sounded too much like wordpress.
I will help as much as I can.
Ya, hopefully the WordPress developers don’t sue me.
Do you want me to look into anything?
Are you going to develop everything from sctratch? or are you going to take some other OpSo and integrate it?
What is going to be the language? java? php?
If you want to use it, I started a forum for FreePress on my site,
http://scatteredthoughts.us/forums/index.php?action=vtopic&forum=4
And after doing this, I suggest a forum solution within your system. Something like the minibb that I have but make it integrated, So if a post gets big and you want to open it to a forum with new topics underneath you can publish it to do so. It would work great for what you are doing now, send the post to the forum and then send other posts as topics under that particular forum.
You following?
It will be from scratch, but the structure will be generally like Wordpress, since that’s what I use and I think it’s pretty good. Actually, one reason I wanted to do this is the first place was to basically rewrite WordPress in a language I’m more familiar with (Java - to answer your second question) so that I could be more confident in the security aspects of the system. I’ve done a little PHP as well, but maybe once the first release is done in Java I will work on a PHP port as a side project while getting to know PHP better. There’s a definite advantage to going with PHP for a blog system, which is that there is much more support from hosting providers for it, but I still think I’ll stick with Java for this time around.
The database will be MySQL, but it will be easily modified to support any DB for which there is a JDBC driver (which is pretty much anything). This will be simple due to following the good design principle of encapsulation of data access into easily replaceable components, so that they can be switched out without modifying any page code or other system logic code. With this approach you could easily modify it to use XML file based storage as an alternative, too.
I like the forum idea, although I don’t know about including it in the blog app. If so, it would have to be in a later version, so that the focus can be on getting the base functionality released as soon as possible.
I’m leaning towards saying that e-mail posting falls into that category as well - more of an add-on than a necessary part of the system. Do you use e-mail posting? The only use I can think of for it is easier posting from a cell phone, which doesn’t have a browser built in. My point of view on that is get a phone with a good browser if you really need to do that. Another drawback to that is that cell phone e-mail clients usually don’t have spell-check, etc.