Blogging

When it comes to choosing a content management system (CMS), the open-source Drupal is often a great choice for large or content-rich sites, because it scales well, supports multiple authors and is thoroughly customizable. The downside of all of this power is that for new users especially, the learning curve can be pretty steep. Although Drupal 6 was a huge step forward in overall usability, from a web admin perspective, it’s still not exactly easy.

Acquia, a company founded by Drupal creator and project lead Dries Buytaert, has just launched Acquia Drupal, which packages Drupal and some of the most popular and highly rated community modules together and also offers commercial support. This is a big win for both Drupal and current and future Drupal users.

Acquia Drupal is a free GPL-licensed download. It contains the Drupal 6.x core (currently at 6.4), a bunch of community contributed modules, like Google Analytics, Mollom (Dries’s spam-fighting content solution), and rating and image gallery tools. I installed Acquia Drupal on my local test server and also installed the latest Drupal release, 6.4. The install process was already easier with Acquia Drupal, because I didn’t have to create a settings.php file in advance before filling in my database details. The additional modules also made for a nicer user interface (see screenshot) and contained an additional site theme.

The real power of Acquia Drupal for businesses is in its commercial support. When I’m developing websites for clients, I always have to keep future tech support in mind. If I’m not going to providing future support, I need to make sure that they can get support quickly and easily somewhere else. I’ve also been in situations where I have stepped into existing sites, and wading through the code to figure out what has been modified and what version of an ope source platform that site is using can be really, really painful. That’s the benefit of using a commercial content management system like ExpressionEngine or Movable Type (Movable Type is also available in an open source community version), if the client needs support, they have someone to contact - and if I need to try to figure something out, I can talk to someone and look at an actual roadmap to figure out what is going on.

Acquia is aiming at bringing those benefits to Drupal. The Acquia Drupal package also includes modules that connect to the Acquia Network. The Acquia Network offers tiered support in yearly subscription packages. The Community subscription (which is free through December 31, 2008 and $200 a year after that), for instance, offers access to the Acquia subscriber forums. The higher tiered plans offer phone, web and e-mail support. The Acquia Network modules let the user conenct directly to support and also let support have a better idea of what is going on. This also means that things like uptime monitoring, code modification detection and remote cron activation can all be tracked and performed.

Certainly attaching paid services and support to an open source project is nothing new. Automattic offers paid solutions and support for WordPress.com , in addition to being the main contributors to the WordPress.org project. Still, this is a really innovative way to market support, while also making the actual product open source and GPL.

If you have considered using Drupal for a project but were afraid of the learning curve and potential support hurdles, check out Acquia.

[via Mashable]

While talking about blogging commandments makes for good headlines, in this case we’re not kidding. The Times Online is reporting that church leaders for the Evangelical Alliance have drawn up ten blogging commandments, meant to mimic the ten commandments that were delivered to Moses by God at the top of Mount Sinai.

At a conference held in Great Britain titled simply “Godblogs”, the commandments were put together and then apparently “engraved on cyberspace tablets”, whatever that means.

Each of the commandments takes its inspiration from the real ten commandments:

1. You shall not put your blog before your integrity
2. You shall not make an idol of your blog
3. You shall not misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin
4. Remember the Sabbath day by taking one day off a week from your blog
5. Honour your fellow-bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes
6. You shall not murder someone else’s honour, reputation or feelings
7. You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind
8. You shall not steal another person’s content
9. You shall not give false testimony against your fellow-blogger
10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s blog ranking. Be content with your own content

We’d like to hear your thoughts: is this a valuable set of rules of thumb, or even commandments to live by, or is it just sort of a cute but gimmicky stunt? Also, I think they really missed the opportunity to make linkbaiting a sin; what blogging commandments do you think they missed? Sound off in the comments.

[via digg]

Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blog publishing software has acquired blog commenting service Intense Debate.

We’ve covered Intense Debate in the past. The service provides web publishers a replacement for the default comments systems supplied by WordPress, Blogger, and Moveable Type and other blog platforms. By installing the plugin, you get threaded comments, reputations, and other advanced features. And readers can track their own comments and those left by others across any blogs or web sites that use Intense Debate.

Intense Debate will continue to be available for use on blog platforms besides WordPress, but Automattic plans to add some features, like threaded comments to WordPress 2.7, which will be the company’s next major release.

This can’t come as good news for Disqus, another company that provides enhanced commenting features for bloggers. While Disqus has gotten a lot of good press over the last year, and has rolled out an impressive suite of blog comment management features, an awful lot of blogs are powered by WordPress. And pretty soon most of those blogs will have quick and easy access to Intense Debate’s features, giving bloggers and blog commentors one less reason to sign up for another blog commenting service.

As if most of the content on the web isn’t crappy enough, now you can use a web service called Datapresser to automatically generate content for your blogs. I can only imagine the sort of repetitive nonsense that would come out of a program intended to generate text.

Billed as a one-of-a-kind content creation and network management system, really all I see is one big blog spam engine. While that might be a bit harsh, let’s look at what’s going on here. Datapresser takes some minimal amount of input, like a few links or a Flickr feed, and automatically generates text around it. From what I can see, it then ensures to cross link to your other properties to try to drive up the page rank of linked pages.

When one of the big selling features is “Datapresser can create content that can fool a human reader”, it’s not hard to guess that the point isn’t so much about fooling human readers as it is about fooling Google. And when the lowest-priced plan includes 500 generated blog posts per day, can this be intended for anything but blog spam?

This product is probably legal, and it probably works. But that certainly doesn’t mean that I have to like it, or think it is moral. I’m certain that the use of Datapresser to generate web content lowers the overall value of the web for everyone else, by filling it with mindless, thoughtless crap. What do you think?

[via thenextweb.org]

Without a doubt, WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms currently available for people who want to install and maintain their content management system on their own server. I mean, what’s not to love? Free, powerful, and easy to use - it’s the whole package.

But for all of its positive attributes, WordPress certainly doesn’t get everything right. Take, for example, the email notifications that the blogging platform generates. They’re ugly, right? Full URLs make for a muddy reading experience.

To be honest, I really wasn’t aware how ugly those emails were until I saw what a difference the Clean Notifications plugin makes. It tidies up and re-arranges the information in notification emails to make them much easier on the eyes. Give it a try, and let us know what you think.

Anyone that blogs about websites and has tried before knows that getting a decent screencap of a web page can be tricky. Enter FireShot, a Firefox extension that makes quality captures child’s play.

Install the add-on and you’re given FireShot creates a tiny menu on your navigation toolbar that gives quick access to full-page and visible area capture functions. It does a great job at rendering pages, even those with Flash animations. Support for saving as PNG, JPEG, GIF, and BMP is built-in, as well as exporting to just about any editor.

What really sets FireShot apart, though, is the integrated upload feature. Select it, and you can resize your image on-the-fly and post it to FireShot’s free image hosting repository with minimal effort. If there’s one feature that helps sell a piece of software to us, it’s how much time and effort we can save by using. FireShot makes putting browser screencap online so easy we almost feel lazy doing it. Almost.

Google has rolled out a whole slew of new features for Blogger, the company’s user-friendly blogging software. In order to enable the new goodies, you’ll need to login to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com. This is where Google rolls out tools that might not be quite ready for prime time. But once you try out the new version, you’ll probably never want to go back.

First up, Google has redesigned the post editor. It’s still a what you see is what you get editor, but the toolbar looks much cleaner and placing images got about a thousand times easier thanks to a new drag and drop image handling. You can also easily resize images by clicking (or double-clicking in Firefox 3) to bring up a box that asks if you’d like an image to be small, medium or large.

Blogger in Draft also has better support for HTML and enables tables and other advanced HTML code to be placed in a post. And the preview feature brings up a new window so you can preview your post without leaving the editor window.

One thing to note is that Google has turned off the autosave feature, so you’ll need to click the save button periodically if you don’t want to lose your work. Autosave should be restored in a future update.
Google has also added the ability to import and export blogs as XML files. This makes it easy to change your blog’s URL without losing any data.

You can also finally allow users to leave comments without leaving your site. There are three options in the comments settings. You can have the old fashioned full page comments, pop up comment boxes, or embedded comments that will show up without leaving the current page. Note that embedded comments might not work if you’ve altered your template in any way. In our tests, the pop up comments worked just fine, but since we’ve kind of pimped out our Blogspot blogs, the embedded comments were a no go.

Finally, there’s a new star rating feature that lets visitors rate each post. Again, this feature may not work if you’ve messed with your Blogger template. There are a few more subtle changes, including the ability to make Blogger in Draft your default Blogger homepage. While Blogger still doesn’t offer the flexibility that competitors like WordPress do, these latest updates do make the service a bit more attractive.

The few, the proud, the Download Squad. Think you have what it takes to join us in world domination covering software and the web? We’re looking for a few great bloggers to add to our team.

We won’t give you a corner office. We will not offer you a company car. Health care? Dude, you’re better off hitting up Clinton or Obama. What we can offer you is a contract, the same pay as every other Weblogs, Inc blogger and a chance to be seen by an enormous number of readers.

How can you apply to be a Download Squad blogger? It’s easy! Write three original sample posts in the style and voice of Download Squad (First person plural — the royal “we”) and under 400 words each. Pithy, witty and sarcastic a plus. (Tip: When we say original, we mean new. Don’t send us previous posts from your own blog!) Send your samples to

Download Squad’s alumni includes a formidable list of blogging talent, are you up to the challenge?

JS-Kit provides some of the simplest tools around for adding threaded comments, post reviews, and polls to your web site. All you have to do is install two or three lines of code to your blog or web site template and JS-Kit will do the heavy lifting. On the downside, since the code basically calls up a JavaScript application from JS-Kit’s servers, some portions of your site might load a little slowly, and if JS-Kit ever goes down, there goes your comment system.

Now JS-Kit has added a new Score tool that lets visitors to your site give content a thumbs up or down. You can also install a Navigator widget which you can then place in a prominent position on your site to let visitors find the most popular stories quickly.

[via Mashable]

A few days ago Yahoo! announce it was purchasing IndexTools, a powerful web analytics suite that rivals similar applications from Google and Microsoft. Now IndexTools COO reports that the plan is to offer IndexTools free of charge. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that for now, the free service will only be available to existing clients and partners who accept the new terms of service. Yahoo! won’t be accepting new users until it rolls out the next version of the application and it’s still too early to know when that will take place.

Eventually the free service could offer some serious competition for Google Analytics, one of the most popular free tools for web publishers who want to track reader statistics and optimize their advertising.

[via Techmeme]