In this post, I discuss the merits and demerits of creating new blogging software for a website or making use of an existing one. I cover background info related to the development of code base at Stardeveloper.com including ASP forum software. After that, I discuss the specific requirements for my blogging software that I am seeking for my website. In the end, I ask my users to comment on how best to proceed.
This blog post is as valid for anyone looking to add blogging software to his/her website as it is for me. If you are interested in seeing what others advise me and what I choose in the end for my blog, please read on. And if you have experience with creating or incorporating a blogging software in your website, your advice will be very much welcomed.
I started my blog a few weeks back. Since I wanted to make the least effort to get started with my blog, I created a new forum and locked it so that only I can post in it. I then started posting my blog posts in that new forum, which I call my blog.
It is okay except the fact that the look and feel of the blog is exactly like that of a forum, so as such there is no uniqueness in it. It also doesn’t show blog categories and archives (based on the dates blog posts were posted). It also doesn’t allow anonymous users to post comments. Along with those things, I want to be able to moderate user comments and remove any spam before it makes it live to my blog.
Everything on Stardeveloper.com including the forum was developed all by myself. Much of the code base on Stardeveloper.com uses classic ASP 3.0 to display data from highly optimized SQL Server 2008 (originally it was SQL Server 2000) database. Lately, I have been working on ASP.NET 2.0 and slowly moving the code base from classic ASP to ASP.NET. An example of this is the home page of Stardeveloper.com.
Initially, for the forum, I used Snitz Forums. But I didn’t like their spaghetti code. Besides, I didn’t want the user to sign-up twice, firstly for posting comments under tutorial pages and secondly to post in the forum. I decided to drop it. I then developed my own forum software. It turned out to be a good move and I am pretty happy with how it has performed over the years.
I am stuck in the same dilemma again and this time it is for the blogging software. I did some research online and two packages come very close to my needs; Subtext and Presstopia. The problem is that Subtext uses a URL like http://www.example.com/archive/2009/12/02/title-of-the-blog-post.aspx, and Presstopia uses http://www.example.com/blog/default.aspx?id=123&t=Title-of-the-Blog to link to blog posts. To make it simple to link to and understand, and for SEO purposes as well, I prefer links like http://www.example.com/blog/title-of-the-blog/ which Matt Cutts has on his blog.
Now, either I can develop my own blogging software, and this time make it free for users to download and use, which fits in well with the rest of the website or change/make use of the existing ones. Got to make this decision by end of December, so that by the start of 2010, my blog will have a new look, exciting for me to post, and interesting for the users to read, comment on and follow.
You can follow Faisal Khan on twitter here.
| « Previous Post | Next Post » |
