Comments on: Blog Software: Who Cares?

By: The blogiest links I could find : The Local

The blogiest links I could find : The Local — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 05:27:54 +0000

[...] Jacques Chester has an in depth look at the interests of the many users of blog software. [...]

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 01:44:20 +0000

Bannerman;

MT does do multi-user these days; but again it’s a post-facto modification. The long experience of computer science is that people inevitably want single-user systems to become multi-user systems: it should be designed in from the start.

By: Bannerman

Bannerman — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 04:50:34 +0000

I’ll stick to MT. It’s moderately easy to translate, I’m too old and too busy to buggerise around with anything else, and I’ll never be bothered with multi-user platforms anyway. besides, MT does the multi-user thing pretty well, from what I understand.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 04:16:05 +0000

Liam;

In general I agree that Usenet should inform the 4th generation. I’m still thinking about it and I’ll talk about it in my next piece.

By: Liam

Liam — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 04:13:21 +0000

OK, I’m with you now.
IMO the one great failure of the WP era has been spammers cluster-fucking the technology of trackbacks/pingbacks, that could have made a very elegant world of distributed content. Ditto gravatars and similar commenter-centred plugins: brilliant in theory, not much chop when the central servers go down.
I’d love to see content management software that was able to properly decentralise, like a blog Usenet, caching everywhere.
And a pony, if you please.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:46:55 +0000

I'm not saying that it's a hard-and-fast classification. When I wrote about the three generations of code it was meant as a rough characterisation. I do note that Wordpress, MT etc grew out of a single-user mentality. It shows. It's also silly to avoid multi-user thinking. It is much harder to beat a single user design into a multi-user than to lock down a multi-user one.

By: Liam

Liam — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:42:23 +0000

Then, as functionality for authors, users and commenters goes, I’m not sure that generationalism is very meaningful. What distinguishes ‘second’ from ‘third’ generation, given that with Drupal or Scoop you could (with a bit of CSS pain) create a site that was functionally identical, for visitors, to a WP one?
I like Wordpress, but it seems to have based its success on simplicity for publishers of smallish hobby blogs, getting rid of the things that would be useful for anybody else.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:22:36 +0000

Liam;

I would probably consider Drupal to be a second-generation platform. It emerged from the “Slashalike” pack a while ago along with Scoop.

With the first generation, each user had their own history stored locally (ie, a Sent box). With the second, most sites allowed you to see what comments a user had made. We lost that with the third generation – most blogs don’t let you see who said what, unless they’re an author.

That’s what I was driving at.

Interesting module.

By: Liam

Liam — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:15:50 +0000

This can lead to a fragmented user history when compared to first and second generation platforms; users cannot easily review their own and others comments history

I'm going to go into bat for Drupal on this one. The Views module is a must-have for this kind of querying functionality. This is really interesting stuff Jacques---keep it coming.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:37:14 +0000

Thank you for rejecting the word stakeholder. Its even more pernicious role is as a false proxy for ‘shareholder’ in corporate governance lingo, or LEFTY-SLYLY-TRY-TO-SLIP-ONE-IN-THE-BACK-DOORIAL.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:21:15 +0000

In the next installment I hope to talk about what features a fourth generation platform might include.