Making a Blog
I am one of those that hate online communities like xanga, myspace, and asian avenue. A lot of my friends have been making their own blogs, since one of them discovered pMachine(pmachine.com) and now they have their own blogs away from all the xanga/myspace nonsense. I was wondering if there is an app that was made for the mac and that is easy to learn and I would be able to practice on my mac and later transfer it to one of the servers I will eventually get.
I have very little web design experience and coding is one of the worst things I try to do. I designed a web site using go live, photoshop, and lmage ready a few years ago and hosted it on hostrocket.com. my friend makes pmachine sound super easy and all he does is update using pmachine. all he had to learn was some CSS and I understand the basics of css so I think I could handle that at least.
(btw I am using a 1.6ghz g5 with 1.25gb of ram, idk if that makes a difference).
thanks
I have very little web design experience and coding is one of the worst things I try to do. I designed a web site using go live, photoshop, and lmage ready a few years ago and hosted it on hostrocket.com. my friend makes pmachine sound super easy and all he does is update using pmachine. all he had to learn was some CSS and I understand the basics of css so I think I could handle that at least.
(btw I am using a 1.6ghz g5 with 1.25gb of ram, idk if that makes a difference).
thanks
Comments
Originally posted by segovius
pMachine Pro has just been updated to 2.4 now with some cool new features - best of all they made it free now because most of their customer base switched to EE.
I love pMachine.
Just set your Mac up as a server, install PMachine and you're off. I'm a big BBEdit fan (not of v8 though) but you might not want to shell out the cash.
even though pmachine is free, i'd buy a personal copy of Expression Engine ($149). to me it's much easier to use, and vastly more flexible/powerful for just about anything you throw at it and they will continue to make it better with each release. don't get me wrong, pamachine is a great tool in it's own right, but the fact that they will no longer be developing it, would give me pause. plus with EE you get 20+ free template designs to play with ( some of the new ones are actually pretty nice), or just spin your own. add to that the built in gallery module, the value of EE is incredible.
Originally posted by segovius
I haven't really looked at EE properly as I was thinking it couldn't be much different for the price but now you've got me curious - the one thing I'd want more in PM is spam comment blocking....actually I can think of a few others now.
So you think it's worth spending the extra then ? Does EE have forums ?
i've heard from a multiple EE developers that the since moving to EE, they have had little to no spam. It's one of the areas that they really improved upon from pmachine. the main difference is that EE gives you the ability to use "captcha imaging, hash-encoded forms, black-listing, comment moderation, member registration, duplicate data denial, IP banning, and more." Check out more info on their site here.
As far as forums go, not currently, but it is being developed as an added module, but they haven't made any announcements as to when it will be released for download. Keep in mind that pamchine's forums are just a creative use of multiple blogs, so it wouldn't be to hard to duplicate that basic functionality in EE as well.
i've been messing with EE since they released it, but haven't really gotten into the guts of it until recently while moving a clients existing static html site over to a css EE powered site. there are still a few things that are missing, but over all it really is superior to pmachine on so many different levels.
Originally posted by running with scissors
even though pmachine is free, i'd buy a personal copy of Expression Engine ($149). to me it's much easier to use, and vastly more flexible/powerful for just about anything you throw at it and they will continue to make it better with each release. don't get me wrong, pamachine is a great tool in it's own right, but the fact that they will no longer be developing it, would give me pause. plus with EE you get 20+ free template designs to play with ( some of the new ones are actually pretty nice), or just spin your own. add to that the built in gallery module, the value of EE is incredible.
I, having used both, would personally forget PMachine and go with WordPress. It's free, it's easy to install, and it has every feature you could need included, plus a quite a few you didn't know you needed as plugins.
And the user support community is great.
You can also consider the client-side option. iBlog runs on your hard drive, and publishes to the web. It feels like an iApp. It's good because you don't have to install anything on the server, and there's a lesser chance of losing everything because of a database corruption. It's not free, however ($15), and isn't as feature-rich as the server-side options.
Originally posted by jgpippin
I, having used both, would personally forget PMachine and go with WordPress. It's free, it's easy to install, and it has every feature you could need included, plus a quite a few you didn't know you needed as plugins.
And the user support community is great.
You can also consider the client-side option. iBlog runs on your hard drive, and publishes to the web. It feels like an iApp. It's good because you don't have to install anything on the server, and there's a lesser chance of losing everything because of a database corruption. It's not free, however ($15), and isn't as feature-rich as the server-side options.
when i started looking into blog/cms solutions a while back, i played with a number of offerings; pmachine, wordpress, nuke, and later momba and expressions engine.
pmachine: liked the simple elegant approach it took with site development. fairly easy to use once you got to playing with it and it had a nice set of built in features. great community and developer support.
wordpress: liked the feature set but just didn't ever feel comfortable using it. needs some more polish, could be simpler to use, but over all, a solid contender.
nuke: too many things wrong with this one to even know where to begin. suffice it to say, it was a mess. had a lot of features, but a mess none the less.
momba: kind of liked this one from the stand point that it was less blog oriented. this is nice when your leveraging the system as a CMS solution for clients. might actually go back and give this one another look down the road if i ever get frustrated with EE.
expressions engine: i kind of fell into this one by default. though i liked pmachine, i was always uncomfortable with it as a CMS solution. when EE came out, i started playing with it and instantly saw the potential. the kind of power/flexibility it has is beyond what many CMS system costing 10s of thousands more are hard pressed to achieve. one area where EE currently falls short is it's lack of community development, but a community module is expected to address this in the next few months. however, as with pmachine, the developer support is outstanding.
Originally posted by iMe
If you're a beginner I would highly reccomend Blogger. You can use their server for free to store your blog or you can even set it up on your own server. If you're looking for something more advanced down the road give WordPress or Textpattern a try.
hey ime,
i decided to look into textpattern, for what it's worth, and really kind of dig it. light weight, not overly complicated, yet with right plugins, it's fairly powerful. the tag syntax is very similar to the way ee works, which is a plus in my book. oh yeah, and it's free, but that's not that big of a deal for what i'm using it for. nice none the less though. the major down side is the lack of documentation and a slow development schedule. i just configured it to my server and will continue exploring it over the week or so. very promising. i'm glad you mentioned it in your post above. thanks.