Ashraf Moollan's Blog

I have tried various blog software in the past to run this blog.

.TEXT

I started using the now defunct .TEXT . In my opinion, .TEXT was excellent. It has a nice feature set and was more than good enough to run a personal blog. In addition, it had a 3rd party MS Access data adapter with everything requires to run it against it – it even had ms access versions of the stored procedures! Before we start shouting shenanigans, I know of all the evils that Access represents, but I still used it because it saved me an extra expense of MsSql hosting.

SubText

According to the makers of SubText,

“Subtext is a personal blog publishing platform that focuses on usability, elegance, and simplicity. “

I gave it a test run on my local machine and it quite literally impressed me. The user interface was clean and easy to use, and offered just the features I needed to run my blog. It also exposed a great plug-in architecture which made it quite extensible.

Then I noticed something. Their website is powered by dotnetnuke!!! If they don’t think that SubText is good enough to run their own website, then why should I run mine on it? It’s a concept called dogfooding . Dogfooding is a pain, it is difficult and it tastes bad. But it shows me that if its good enough to run your own site on it, then i can consider running mine on it too. Community Server does it, Dotnetnuke does it and WordPress does it. Subtext doesn’t.

DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke is an extensible content management system. It is not a blogging platform per se. The appeal of dotnetnuke is that the average Joe can create and maintain their website without requiring a web professional to help them. There are convenient buttons and the text is editable in-place in a rich-text format ala Microsoft Word.

So why did I put dotnetnuke here as a blogging software? Because dotnetnuke is extensible, people have extended it to include a blog module. The blog module make dot net nuke behave as a blog engine and will run your blog sweetly on it.

I confess that I have used dotnetnuke in the past to run this website. I loved it. The user interface was friendly and it was very easy to add and edit posts and best of all, the post entries were fully SEO (Search Engine Optimised).

Having said all this, my design skills suck. I started, like most, with the basic default skin. Eventually I went on to create my own skin, and I can tell you – creating a skin in dotnetnuke is a Royal pain in the A**. Excuse the language.

Community Skins are rare. Most (of the few) persons who could make good skins for dotnetnuke try to make a profit by selling the skin (rightly or wrongly). And finally I gave up on my website looking good with dotnetnuke, and i tried Community Server.

Community Server

Community Server is used by MySpace and powers 70 million+ users. That is incredible. Community Server has more to it than Blogging – it has forums, photo gallery and file sharing as well. Community Server is created by the Author of .TEXT, Scott Watermasysk along with other guys from the nGallery and ASP.NET forums.

I gave Community Server a shot for a little while, and while sporting quite an impressive feature set, it was not suitable for a 1-person site running nothing more than a blog. While it does work for that scenario, it is just an overkill. The default skins were better than the dotnetnuke skins by yards and miles, but it had that “generic” feel to it. And so I dumped it.

WordPress

And here I am running this blog on WordPress. There is a buzz around wordpress. Lots of people use it, and what more so, lots of people like it. It’s clean, simple to use and has a powerful plugin framework (yes i know, they are the rage) .

Speaking of plugins, WordPress has an addin called Askimet that is very very good at sorting out spam comments without needing a captcha! (you know those images that you need to type in a box?)

The skins are customisable and there are tons and tons of free wordpress themes all over the internet . Heck the one I am using at the moment is one of them (thanks wpthemespot)

The only caveat so far about WordPress is the amount of database calls it makes to load each page. Why should you care? Let me tell you. If a blog does not have that many visitors, then that is fine. but the more visitors a blog has, the more database calls it makes, and the slower the website responds. And with the database calls, the server also uses more CPU to render your website, which does not help to make it run faster.

Having said this, the WordPress community has quickly caught on and developed plugins that will cache your pages and serve from the page where possible – and this drastically improve performance. Pity that this isn’t an out-of-the-box feature.

Closing Comments

Interresting (but totally useless) piece of information. All blogging software mentioned except for WordPress are built in .NET (and thus requires a windows hosting environment). What IS interresting is that they all use a database as a back-end and sql server (that is what the windows based applications generally use as a database server) hosting tend to be a lot more pricey than their non-windows counterpart.

WordPress on the other hand is built on php and uses MySql as the backend. Both are cheap as dirt to host.

And the question I get asked more often by my friends is “why the hell did you use a php blog software when you are clearly such a .NET guy!”. Heck I AM a professional .NET developer after all. Why I chose a php solution? Simple. The implementation of the blog software is the least of my concern. As a user, what I do care about is a hassle free, clean and easy to use software. WordPress gives me that.

All of the blogging software discussed here are free software that you host on your own domain. I have not discussed hosted blog software such as blogspot etc, althouth wordpress does offer free hosting for you.

Now that I have confused you with all these, my work is done.

Thank you.

Ash Moollan.