It's now about six months that I use Roller as my blog server software. My experiences are mixed and I am seriously thinking about writing my own software for publishing on the net. Let me explain.
Up front I have to say that Roller worked quite stable. I don't have the latest and greatest version (3.0) installed, but live on the 2.3. Customization has been a little bit of pain, but I read the this is supposed to be improved in the newer version. The server died unexpectedly only three or for times (tomcat gone) which could well have been memory related. The machine it is running on is not that big.
The dislikes came when the server was discovered by spammers. Partly I have to blame myself for keeping defaults on Roller features and not really trying to understand all and decide for myself. The other part I blame on Roller's insecure defaults: embedding referrer urls inside the page and enabling trackback comments.
When I say blame
, I should correctly say was not behaving as I myself needed it
. I think the software is fine, works well and has all features I want. But the features I do not need seem to require attention that I do not have to spare.
Here is what I want for my site software:
- all public resources served from static files by apache, e.g. no security issues, no performance issues, no tricky setups, deployable anywhere by copying the file tree
- a site builder software that runs offline (on my laptop) which generates the public file tree from a set of source files.
- source files under revision control in a software repository (cvs, svn or other).
- publishing by way of ssh/rsync
- writing blog entries/pages in a wiki dialect and controlling the generated HTML so that style/layout changes can be done for the complete site by a single rebuild
- version control: as I think this is essential for everything. Even if you are the only person working on a set of files, it often happens that you work on different computers on them (so you are vitually another person) and software repositories are just made for that sort of thing. And often there is already a backup strategy for a software repository, so you have your site backed up without further hassle.
- low admin: in this way of working, there is nothing to worry about once you have published. There are no user accounts to be hacked, no writes via HTTP to the server. Apache will handle any load gracefully and I have never ever experienced it going down unexpectedly in such a configuration.
- flexibility: I don't want to write HTML no more. Nope. Nada. Not only is any wiki dialect easier to write, but computers are just better at generating good HTML. So let them. Also layout changes give no hassles, you can change generated classnames should the need arise. And last but not least: the HTML generation can be staged. I am free to invent a XML format for, say, documenting recipes and a HTML generator for it (or a wiki generator which is then converted to HTML). Lots of nice ideas come to mind...
There is one feature which almost every blogger uses which is not covered here: comments. I admit, I have no ready solution to it. A rather obvious idea would be to open a blog comment server on the internet where you can comment on any blog out there and bloggers just include a link or some jscript into their pages. Wouldn't that be neat? Google? Technorati? Yahoo? Do you already have such a thing? With a Web API so that my site generation can include/delete/moderate them if I want?
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