March 20, 2006

Getting into blogging again

I wanted to get started with serious blogging again. In particular I want an easy to follow user interface for podcasting with a blog. Wordpress came up trumps but the killer is that it’s a single installation per user system! MovableType does podcasting the M.T perl way which involves custom templates and hard coding categories. Podcasting in Drupal seems to be vague at best so I might have to try this out. And Textpattern would be my knee jerk favourite but totally lacks any podcasting support and does not support XMLrpc so that you cannot use a stand alone editor like Zempt or w.bloggar.

Blog Comparisons

Wordpress

Wordpress is basically a single user single blog per installation. This obviously does not scale well for a college blog site. Alternative approaches:

Q: Is Lyceum ready for production use?
A: No. The schema has not been finalized, the import and upgrade infrastructure is not in place, and the code is in need of a security audit.

The Lyceum Project » Frequently Asked Questions has an interesting section on differences with MU:

Q: What is the difference between Lyceum and WordPress MU?
The main difference between Lyceum and MU is the database schema. MU creates a set of tables for each blog in a system. Lyceum uses a fixed number of tables for the entire system.
In WordPress MU, every user must have a blog. In Lyceum, users and blogs are completely unrelated entities. Each blog can have arbitrary users, each with arbitrary permissions, and it is possible for a user to have no permissions on no blogs (this makes sense because a blog administrator may choose to only allow comments from users who are registered on the system).
In Lyceum, each blog can turn (pre-approved, admin-installed) plugins on and off as they like.

MovableType

TextPattern

“Txp’s implementation of Textile is frustrating. I’d like to see it brought to feature-compatibility with Brad Choate’s Textile 2 but my understanding is that this simply isn’t going to happen”.

Rats — This is really depressing. Even MT 2.6 supports Textile 2 and that’s nothing like as powerful as Xilize.

Drupal

  • drupal.org . This does support multiple users and has a number of interesting plugins.
  • Integrates with Gallery : Gallery “It has recently been updated to work with the official release of Gallery 2 (1.0). drupal + gallery 2
  • Podcasting support is confusing. There’s an officially supported Audio module which plays audio in situ but it’s not clear how this enables podcasting. This conversation talks about about a new podcasting module and Narkoba has a beta podcast module but it’s not clear how bug free this is. VoodooStevie uses the Audio Module to create podcasts like so:

I have been using this method for podcasting and it seems to work.

  1. Record podcast
  2. Bring MP3 file into iTunes
    • Change Title, Author and album and place show notes into comments.
    • Add Album Art
    • Use Convert To MP3 to set the settings into a new MP3 file
  3. Upload using Audio Module
  4. In Drupal
    • Add a vocabulary for the Audio Module and add an item called Podcast or a tagline for your show.
    • Use the URL Alias for the feed (/taxonomy/term/whatever to be like podcast.xml for example)
    • Test in iTunes.

Voodoostevie’s site VooDooRadio seems to be quite user friendly. You see the latest podcast episode with an inline player. There are links under it to download the audio file and read more. The third link labelled “The Twisted For Your Pleasure Podcast” merely displays all the individual episodes and then you’re left wondering how you subscribe in iTunes. On the the right column there’s a tiny button labelled “iTunes” which when pressed starts up the iTunes application (if you allow it to) and then goes to the feed on iTunes itself where you can subscribe to the whole thing or get individual episodes. Slick and easy, but would have been better with the button displacing the third link

Blog Design

Blog Design Solutions — Amazon link looks very interesting.

Also see:

Conclusion

Without a doubt WordPress has the best podcasting support and the linkage with Gallery looks really cool. But the single user per installation is a real killer. Drupal seems to be podcast capable and has the potential to solve the podcast upload/locate problem. I need to get this installed on Macarius and do some testing.

Posted by markp at March 20, 2006 06:18 PM