Weblogging with SUSE Linux


Weblogging, or just plain blogging, has been around for a relatively long time. The practice managed to claw its way into broad public consciousness in 2004, to the point of being a candidate for TIME Magazine's Person of the Year.

Some observers believe that weblogs represent a new form of journalism, as ordinary folks bring their life experiences and perspectives to bear on events large and small and have a potentially global audience to read what they say.

Bloggers use their sites in all sorts of ways, serious and trivial:

  • Online personal journals, to keep friends and family posted on the latest news.

  • A place to share new information (often gleaned from the web itself) about a shared passion.

  • Businesspeople are increasingly using blogs to communicate with employees and customers.

  • People on the scene at business or technology conferences and similar events report, often in real time, on what's happening to inform those who couldn't be there.

  • Political commentators of nearly every persuasion imaginable share news, gossip, and commentary on current events.

  • Journalists professional, amateur, and in between share information about stories they cover that may not make it into the paper or on the air.

Blogs can be one person's project or have multiple authors. They can be on one topic, broad or narrowly defined, or they can be on whatever pops into an author's head. There are great blogs and poor blogs in all categories. Some are read by thousands every day, but most are read by only a few.

Whatever you want to do with your blog, about the only rule that matters is that a blog home page features posts in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts at the top of the page. Other characteristics that help differentiate blogs from ordinary websites include the following:

  • Blog posts are usually archived and have a link to the URL where the post will be archived when it floats off the home page. This URL, called a permalink, is done because bloggers often link to other blog posts to comment on them. With permalinks, and a similar process called TrackBacks, readers can then follow the "conversation" between two or more blogs on the same topic.

  • Blogs often have sidebars, called blogrolls, with listings of the bloggers' favorite blogs and other websites.

  • Bloggers were among the first to use an XML technology called Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or a competing technology, Atom, to make postings easily accessible. More traditional news outlets are now adding these XML feeds to their sites, and browsers (Firefox, Opera) and portal sites (Yahoo!) are including RSS and Atom readers in their products. See the next section for more on syndication.

  • Most blogs encourage interaction between reader and writer. Some blogs permit readers to comment on posts directly on the page. This practice has decreased as spammers began inundating popular bloggers' pages with their wares, but has not disappeared completely.

Not every blog has all these features, and some sites that have these features are not blogs.

Blogging, because it's on the web, is an activity that isn't terribly concerned with operating systems. Many blogs are written directly in a blogger's browser and hosted on the same site. Many bloggers, though, want to separate the writing from the posting, and so use editing tools that run locally on a desktop or laptop and then upload pages to a remote site, just like regular websites.

In this section, we'll review some of the more popular tools that Linux users blog with along with a quick review of some of the popular blog hosts (like Blogger, Typepad, and LiveJournal) that welcome bloggers with all operating systems to participate.

SUSE Linux does not include specific blogging tools in the distribution, although the Quanta team wants you to know that one of the biggest "A-list" blogs, WilWheaton.net, is produced with its tool. Some tools are easy to install; others require a little bit of database or Apache savvy.

Blogging with Blosxom

Blosxom is an incredibly easy blog-creation tool written by Rael Dornfest, one of the blog founding fathers. Blosxom (pronounced "blossom") is a simple CGI script that sits on your web server and turns ordinary text files into blog posts.

For those with simple blogging needs (mostly plain text, with the occasional hand-created link and styled text), Blosxom is perfect. But don't think that it's just for basic users. With Blosxom's plug-in architecture and easily modified configuration dialog box, you can accomplish many things with your blog.

Blosxom runs as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script on your web server, so if you want your blog live on the web at all times, you need to have a host that permits running CGI scripts (most do). You may want to experiment with several tools before settling on one, though. For this, you have the capability to run Apache on your own SUSE Linux Professional system. See Chapter 26 for a more detailed explanation of Apache.

To try Blosxom on your own Apache server, follow these steps to install:

1.

Go to http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/blosxom.zip to download Blosxom.

2.

Extract blosxom.cgi into the ~/public_html/cgi directory and make it executable (chmod 755).

3.

Create a local directory to store your Blosxom posts; Blosxom recommends ~/blosxom, but you can choose anything you like.

Caution

Don't choose a common directory to store your posts in. Blosxom will post to your blog any file in the directory with the appropriate extension (*.txt by default).

4.

Open blosxom.cgi in a text editor to configure your blog. The first 10 entries in the script describe what Blosxom should do. Name your blog. Give it a description, which can be prosaic (this blog is about growing marigolds) or creative (ruminations on canine lycanthropy and other wizardly things). Set the language. Tell the script where to look for posts (the directory you selected in step 3). You can probably leave the remainder of the entries with their default settings, but consult the manual if you want to know more.

5.

Write a test post. Open your text editor and write something. Save it with a .txt extension into the posting directory.

6.

Open your favorite web browser and go to the directory where blosxom.cgi lives, such as

http://home/<username>/public_html/cgi/blosxom.cgi

7.

Your test post should appear, with your blog's title and description, along with the date and time of your post.

For more information on working with your blog, visit the http://www.blosxom.com site.

Movable Type and Typepad

Movable Type (MT) is considered by many to be the gold-standard weblog application. It has a reputation of being somewhat difficult to install, but it has so many features, it's worth the moderate pain. Many of the more technical-oriented blogs run MT, as do quite a few businesses and news organizations.

Typepad is the Blogger-type hosting service set up by Movable Type's developers. Typepad makes it easy to produce a high-quality MT-type blog without having to manage the installation. They've even made it a going concern by charging a minimal monthly fee ($4.95 as this is written) for basic users.

MT runs on just about every platform and can use any web server or database application you prefer. There is a free version for personal use, but if you want to have multiple authors for your blog, you'll need a paid version (less than $100).

Blogging with WordPress

WordPress is a very popular system, but a little complex to run. It is driven by a MySQL database, which must be running before you get started. Chances are your web host will support database-driven sites, but you should check in advance.

Similarly, if you want to try out WordPress on your local system first, you will have to get MySQL and PHP set up and running. Use YaST to install the PHP and MySQL packages. See Chapter 29, "Managing Databases," for more information on setting up MySQL.

To set up WordPress

1.

Go to http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz to download the current version.

2.

Extract the tarball to any directory (your home directory will do nicely, as it will create a WordPress directory).

3.

Create a WordPress user in YaST. Call it wpress.

4.

Create a new MySQL database. From a root shell, type /usr/bin/mysqladmin -p create wordpress.

5.

Log in to the WordPress database: /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -p -u root

6.

Give the WordPress user access to the WordPress database: GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress TO wpress@localhost IDENTIFIED BY wppass; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress TO wpress IDENTIFIED BY wppass;. When this is completed, type exit to return to the shell.

7.

Either from the shell or your favorite file manager, copy the contents of the WordPress directory that you created in step 2 to the ~/public_html home directory. If you already have content there (or want your blog to be part of your larger site), copy the whole directory over.

8.

Open your favorite browser and go to the directory where you extracted WordPress to: http://localhost/wp-admin/install.php. The install screens check that everything is in order and will occasionally ask you a question.

9.

WordPress generates a password for the administrator in the install process. Log in to post. You'll see a very nice interface that's pretty straightforward. Fire away!

The WordPress website offers, among other things, plug-ins and templates to further customize your experience.

Popular Blog Services

The biggest and best-known blogging services generally offer both live-in-your-browser posting and free storage space on their servers for your blog. Some offer the option to email posts, which can be a handy device. Here's a quick overview of what you can do with these services.

Blogger (www.blogger.com)

The best known, and still the easiest way to get started in the blogosphere. Basic accounts are free, and there are lots of templates to choose from.

In many ways, Blogger is the America Online of the weblog industry; it's where people get started. Blogger blogs run the gamut of styles, but lean toward the personal-journal end of the spectrum.

There are three ways to post. The web-based interface, and using email are the standard ways; you can also create an audio-post via telephone.

LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com)

LiveJournal started as a way for a group of friends to keep each other posted on their lives. It grew into a large, but still by-invitation-only, community of all kinds of journal-keepers. Today, anyone can get a LiveJournal account and start blogging.

LiveJournals are best known for their mood-indicator and other colorful graphics and lists of connections between users. The LiveJournal code is open source software (visit www.livejournal.org to contact the development team or download the source).

You can post via the web interface or use one of several Linux clients (Kluje for KDE, Logjam and Drivel for GNOME). They also have clients for personal digital assistants (Palm and PocketPC) and cell phones.

Typepad

As mentioned earlier, Typepad is the hosting service from Movable Type's developers. It is currently available for $4.95 a month for basic users.

Syndicating Your Blog

As you travel around the Web, you may have seen the little orange rectangles marked XML on certain pages. This is especially true for weblog sites, but increasingly true on regular news sites (CNET News.com, BBC News, Christian Science Monitor, CNN, and Alternet, among others) as well. Perhaps you've clicked the button and saw the equivalent of an HTML source page and wondered what that was for. What you're really seeing is a new way of delivering news and information to you: headline (or full text) syndication of website content.

Publishing a syndicated version of your blog is a great way to gain readers. Most blogging software does this by default, and it is otherwise easy to set up. With syndication, readers can find your blog through blog-search sites like Weblogs.com, Daypop, Feedster, Bloglines, and Syndic8. As a blog reader, syndication also simplifies building collections of blogs to read.

Syndication is about delivering information (also called newsfeeds, or just plain feeds) from your site to other sites or applications. When you syndicate your site, you can deliver just headlines, full-text rendering of your postings, or some portion of them. Applications called aggregators, or feedreaders, ping the server periodically (typically hourly) to see what's new and deliver new content to readers who have subscribed to your feed.

There are two popular formats to syndicate with: RSS and Atom. This is another religious war you can choose to participate in, or not. RSS (also known as Rich Site Summary) is the older format. Development of this format is run by Dave Winer of Userland Software. A group of developers/bloggers decided that RSS wasn't providing the features they wanted and developed the Atom standard. Some blog software supports one standard or the other, some support both. All the aggregators support both standards.

Reading News and Blogs with Aggregators

Only recently have dedicated newsfeed aggregators begun appearing in Linux. The latest versions of the Firefox and Opera browsers both have aggregators built in. Akregator for KDE is gaining converts, and there are also several excellent online aggregators.

When Firefox arrives at a site with a syndicated feed, an orange button lights up in the lower-right corner of the browser. Click it to create what they call a "Live Bookmark." This is stored with the rest of your bookmarks. When you go to a Live Bookmark, it looks like a folder with the orange icon, with headlines inside the folder. Click a link to go to the permalinked page for that headline.

Opera reads RSS feeds through its built-in mail reader. Subscribing to a feed is as easy as clicking the XML button on a site. Opera will ask you if you want to subscribe; click Yes, and the current headlines will appear. Opera will check for new headlines when it opens.

Akregator is joining the Kontact personal information management suite with KDE 3.4 and is already in pretty good shape. It integrates with Konqueror, but opens articles in its own browser window, rather than having to open Konqueror separately.

If you switch between computers and operating systems frequently, you might like an online aggregator. The best of these is at http://www.bloglines.com. Bloglines works with most browsers (with the exception of Konqueror, which doesn't like the script Bloglines uses to display your feeds). You can organize your feeds into subject folders and add and remove feeds with ease. Bloglines will even look at your current feed lineup and offer recommendations for new blogs that might interest you.



SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed
SUSE Linux 10.0 Unleashed
ISBN: 0672327260
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 332

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