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Approaches to Blogging Applications

The decision to include a blog in a web site, as discussed in the previous section, is a fairly easy and straightforward one. The next decision—how to implement it—can be daunting. Three years ago the number of blogging applications were sparse, so there were a few choices to weigh. Today the number of available solutions is dizzying.

A comprehensive analysis of all the major blogging packages is far beyond the scope of this article. (It would take a month of research, much of which would involve configuring server scripts. No thanks.) I will attempt, however, to break down the different solutions into a few basic categories and discuss them generally.

Hand-coded Blogs

Perhaps the easiest and most straightforward way to put a blog in your website (assuming you are already versed in website design) is to simply edit your homepage every few days and add some new text to it. Indeed, this is how I began my own blog and my site's front page continues to use this system. It takes almost no effort to load up Dreamweaver and type some new content at the top of the page.

As I said, my site's homepage is still using this system, so unless I'm an idiot there must be some merit to the decision. Honestly, the biggest reason I'm keeping my homepage this way is that I'm not finished evaluating my options. If I were to lock myself into a particular blogging application early, it may be difficult to migrate the data (my entries) into a different system.

So as to the advantages: it is a simple and straightforward method. I can control the look and feel of the blog without doing any complicated application reconfiguration. I can migrate my data fairly easily.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage is that after a few months all this content can become awkward to manage. Every now and then—I'm picking the middle of the month—content needs to be pulled off the main page and archived somehow. After only two months of keeping an active blog I'm noticing this difficulty. The other disadvantage is that I have no easy means of adding pre-built functionality to my site. There's no functionality for community feedback, it would be a significant effort to hand-code an opinion poll, there's no functionality for breaking the information into categories, advanced navigation, etc.

Dynamic Packages

Virtually every mainstream, hard-core, industrial strength blog out there uses some server-side dynamic content package running Perl or PHP or Java that assembles outgoing web pages by pulling your entries from a database. An impressive amount of effort has been put into designing these systems. They tend to be built to be easily expandable with modules that handle polls, calendars, user (audience) login and preferences, configurable look and feel, and community feedback/forum functionality using database technology.

If you are truly serious about implementing a blog, you expect a serious audience, and you demand serious functionality, this is arguably your only choice. But it comes at a price. The first thing you need is access to your web server, at least insomuch as to allow some scripting technology (and an available database) to be installed and configured. The configuration and maintenance task is also up to you.

Does this sound daunting? Well, depending on your existing computer skill set it's certainly doable, but I would never consider a server-side application to be nontrivial. However, there are a number of web hosts who (for a fee) will offer blogging as an optional service. Where there's a will there's a way.

Static Packages

The iBlog application belongs to this category. Its function is to turn your blog into a series of static web pages that get uploaded to your server, which in turn function like a dynamic site. There are a number of advantages to this approach:

1. You do not need administrative control over your web server. You can ftp your blog up to any hosted web space. Given the number of ways you can obtain free web space (most peoples' ISPs offer some free space) getting a blog up and running is almost trivial. In fact, you don't even have to know any HTML to get it to work, just a few configuration (FTP) settings.
2. Pages load quickly. Static web pages put the least load by far on a web server. A fairly wimpy server can handle a decent web load if it's only serving up static pages of mostly text.
3. The application may be rather easy to use with a nice native GUI. iBlog fits into this category.

What are the disadvantages? Well, in order to create functionality that resembles that of a dynamic server solution you need to have lots and lots of static pages. After two months of blogging I have almost 100 static pages. You see, iBlog has to generate one page for every individual blog entry, another page for every day of the year that has blogs (for by-date navigation), a page for every category... It adds up!

Another disadvantage to this solution is that it may become difficult to extract your blog data from the application if you decide down the road to move to a dynamic server solution. Of course, data portability is not easy for any solution, but with a static page generating application you must hope that there's a decent data export functionality.

Hosting Sites

If you want to get up and running with your blog as fast as possible, there are some sites out there that will offer you the functionality (though a web interface, of course) to create your blog on their site. They create a community of bloggers and provide a number of nice features. A single example of a hosted cite is Blog-City.com.

Some of these sites give you a varying amount of configurability, but in general you lack the freedom to really make it your site. If you have dreams to creating a maintaining a web site over which you have complete control, this may not your first choice.

For my needs I consider this the least appealing option, but then again, I've spent months working hard creating my humble web site and establishing a web presence. I would like to say that these online blogging communities are impressive and the various hosts are providing a wonderful service to the people who use them.

Weighing Your Options

Again, it's all about finding the right tool for the right person. Hopefully you will know enough about your current situation—server availability, pre-existing content, configurability demands, goals, etc.—to begin to know which technology you are going to need. Frankly, if you plan on eventually having a serious, active, long-running blog, the dynamic server solution will very likely become your ultimate target.

As for me, I'm currently entering every web log into both my hand-coded homepage and my iBlog implementation. This takes some time doing the "cut and paste thing" and hand coding all my web links, but it has allowed me to evaluate iBlog and to understand my own goals better.

This marks the end of the general theory. From this point the article will only focus on implementing your blog with iBlog.

Next section: Starting with iBlog

Written material copyright © 2003 by Murray Todd Williams

Page last modified 11/02/2003 17:01