greymatter blogger

[oilman]

I recently found this nifty little daily posting program called GreyMatter [noahgrey.com]. It's in the same vein as blogger but you host it yourself and don't have to rely on blogger's servers - which are much better now for any of you that are blogger users. They just got 3 new servers.

[Brett_Tabke]

I've read the faq, skimmed the help file, and for the life of me, I can't figure out what that program is or does.

[oilman]

It's a weblog system - basically it's like an online diary that you can update at your choosing without having to code any html beyond the templates. If you go to blogger.com and look there they've done a much better job of explaining the concept. Check out one of the user sites and it should make sense then. The only real difference between blogger and greymatter is that blog hosts their system while greymatter is a downloadable program you host yourself.

[rcjordan]

I keep coming back to bloggers and also news scripts like Newspro [amphibian.gagames.com]. There's a great use there for the enterprising webmaster -applying them for something other than their intended purpose. Trouble is, I haven't figured out what it is (yet).

[Brett_Tabke]

Hmmm. Ok. I don't see an application for it yet.

[rcjordan]

Whoa! Looks like bloggers are going mainstream...

Blogged Down in the PR Machine [ojr.usc.edu] -USC Online Journalism Review

nublog [contenu.nu] -(This is a blogger? Wow!)

Weblogs for public relations [contenu.nu] -a good how-to article.

[toolman]

Yeah this has been building up steam for awhile. Cruise through the PHP and Perl channels and you'll see all kinds of spin offs from this train of thought.

[rcjordan]

My mind is spinning with the possibilities... Besides greymatter, has anyone run across -or better yet, used- other self-hosted, templated blogger scripts?

[toolman]

What exactly do you see here rc?

Certainly the interactivity can help build repeat traffic.

[rcjordan]

Heck with the interactivity... I'm thinking about bastardizing the scripts to publish, say, real estate listing pages without html. Or product catalogs. Or even a directory system (searchable, btw) for an already existing site. Take a look at the features page of GreyMatter [noahgrey.com] and think on it a bit from that angle.

<added>
BTW, these have been buggin' Oilman and me for a long time [webmasterworld.com].

[toolman]

Oh yes...I understand the self-service real estate thing. That's exactly what needs to happen with Realtors. PHP and MySQL could do this more efficiently I think.

[rcjordan]

>PHP and MySQL could do this more efficiently I think.

I'll trade simplicity for efficiency any time... particularly when I'm dealing with real estate. And perl's gonna be there when you open the cgi-bin, not so w/ PHP and MySQL.

[toolman]

>>>I'll trade simplicity for efficiency

This will always be true.....but I think PHP and MySQL are where it's headed and it is already becoming more mainstream in the hosting business to offer them. One draw back PHP has is the file extension...whereas perl can be parsed as an ssi on a .html page. There are ways around this supposedly but I haven't had any luck with them yet.

[oilman]

one thing to point out with greymatter - if your hosting it on a system that runs a reaper it'll cause greymatter to puke up 500 Server Errors. My buddy had to move to a different host to deal with it.

[Gorufu]

>> One draw back PHP has is the file extension...whereas perl can be parsed as an ssi on a .html page. There are ways around this supposedly but I haven't had any luck with them yet.

For PHP 3.x.x add
AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .html
to .htaccess for individual directories and sub-directories.

For PHP 4.x use
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

For all domains and directories on the server find the line
AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .php3
in httpd.conf or srm.conf and add .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .php3 .html

If you add it to httpd.conf or srm.conf Apache will need to be restarted for changes to take effect.