Stardate 20020202.1507

(Captain's log): Eric writes:

Could you please give me your opinion on blog software, hosting, design, etc. Two other friends/colleagues are participating from different locations so we need that capability. I also want to stream my 2-hour weekly radio show (hosted from blog site? a link to another site? that 365.com thing?) and put up 30-second soundbytes of our own songs.

When someone asks me "What computer should I buy?", I ask them what they want to do with it. If they don't know, then what I advise them to do is to buy the cheapest computer they can find and use it for a year, then throw it away. After that, they'll have figured out what they are going to be using their computer for, and then we can make a better try at figuring out what will satisfy their needs.

By the same token, if someone is intent on starting out blogging, probably the best thing to do is to start slow. You might find that you lose interest in it. Depending on what you want to create, the investment of time can be substantial. Some people start it and find that they don't stick with it.

So the place to begin is to go to Blogspot and get a free site, and use Blogger with it. Do that for a couple of months to get a feel for what is involved, and then reexamine things to decide what you want to do. (Alternative choice: PITAS.)

After that, you make one of four choices: give up, stick with a free hosting service, go with a paid hosting service, or get your own server and your own pipe.

It may be that you find you lose interest. In that case you have your answer.

But if you end up wanting to stick with it, the big disadvantage of free systems is that they generally impose a traffic cap. For instance, if you have a site on Geocities and it gets too popular, then some of the time when someone tries to get in they'll get an error frame instead which says that the site has exceeded its allocated traffic level. Blogspot doesn't do that yet, but I think it's only a matter of time. Free sites also tend to impose advertising on your page. (The money has to come from somewhere.)

You can also go with a paid hosting service. There are numerous choices for this but I don't know much about any of them, because they all have the same problem from my point of view. But to explain what it is, you need to learn a word.

Every once in a while someone does something which strikes a chord, and word spreads like wildfire. It will get linked out the wazoo, and traffic levels may rise 100:1. Originally the most common reason for this to happen was because it was linked from the site /., hence the name: when this happens, you've been slashdotted. But there are number of other ways this can happen. Sometimes it's a distributed effect, with a lot of small-traffic sites; sometimes some other big-traffic site will do it. It's completely unpredictable, but it can ruin your whole day. There's such a thing as being too popular.

The reason it's a problem is that it can cost you big time. There was a case of a guy who had this happen to him and he received a bill from his hosting service for $17,000. (He fought it in court and won; he didn't have to pay it.) Most paid sites have a deal where your base cost per month includes a certain amount of traffic, and any traffic beyond that is billed pro-rata. Get slashdotted, and "pro-rata" can get mighty expensive.

The third choice (which is the one I went with) is to get your own server and your own pipe. This is a much bigger up-front cost (I ended up spending about $2000 for mine, including software) and also costs more per month (I pay $200 per month for bandwidth) but the cost is fixed and predictable. In my case, if I get slashdotted all that will happen is that my pipe will saturate. I won't get charged any more. Pipe availability and expense varies with your location.

Tools for blogging? Again, you takes your choice. There are some common tradeoffs which need to be discussed. The most important is where the tool runs. There are three choices, and each has advantages and disadvantages.

First, it can run on your own server. Second, it can run on a common server somewhere. Third, it can run on your client computer. The advantage of a server-side package is that it means you can use it from anywhere, whereas if it is on your client then you can only use it from that client. If it runs on your own server, then you are not reliant on anyone else, but it may put an unacceptable load on your system if your server isn't very powerful. Generally this requires the server to permit some form of scripting, and many commercial services don't permit this. If it runs on a common server somewhere then it means that if that server goes down, you're dead in the water. The biggest advantage of a client side package is that most of the work is done on your client, which presumably is powerful and not being used for anything else at the time, so you are self-reliant and at the same time you are not loading your server down. It also means that you don't need any special privilege on your server.

So here is an (incomplete) list of alternatives I know something about:

Greymatter (runs on your server): This is a package written in PERL, available in source form. Noah Grey wrote it for his own use and decided to give it awa