I don’t want to short-change one of the inventors of blogging (or at least of RSS), and a software industry veteran, Dave Winer, and his Radio Userland.
This application, Radio, was one of, if not the first, pieces of software that allowed the creation of a weblog right from your computer. A later program that I’ve used that does the same thing is Apple’s iWeb. Each of these programs lets you create pages and then uploads them to a web server – there’s no additional software required on the web server, unlike the three offline blogging tools I’ve covered recently, Flock, ecto and MarsEdit.
But Radio and iWeb stand the model “on its head” compared to the way WordPress and Blogger work. Who would use them? [read more…]
Just to let you know a little about Dave, here’s one of the things Tim O’Reilly says about him (as quoted by Dave) – “RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer’s ‘Really Simple Syndication’ technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape’s ‘Rich Site Summary’, which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows.” – Tim O’Reilly.
[OK, so maybe I’d better explain RSS later on – with links to other people’s explanations – I’ll make a note of that.]
In the first two models that I’ve described for posting to blogs, there’s some blog software that lives on a big server somewhere. This may be software provided for you as part of a free service, someone may be charging you for the hosting, or you might have installed the software on your own server – whatever the case, the software lives on that “big server in the sky” and has additional web server software in front of it to serve the pages to your visitors. In one model you interact directly with that software to create your blog posts. In the other you can create posts and upload them to the server.
But, Radio Userland and Apple’s iWeb use a third model – both provide software that runs on your computer and creates pages that are then uploaded to a web server to be delivered directly to visitors. No blog software is needed on the big server – everything is created, edited and posted from your computer to the web server. One of the reasons you might want to do this is that serving up HTML (web) pages without any blog software sitting behind them on the server can be quite economical – it places far fewer demands on the server. I’d refer to these as “static” pages – the web server just goes and gets the HTML from a disk drive and sends it to a visitor’s web browser. Whereas WordPress and other packages may require significant computation, since they’re written in “interpreted” languages like PHP that require quite a bit of computer power to create each page. (Combined with a cache they can be more economically served, if that’s your concern.)
I’m not going to go over the features of these programs – they’re both quite broad – and worth the price. If you’re interested in this model, go to the web sites and check the feature lists. For full-disclosure purposes, I’ve used iWeb to post podcasts, and I know it works. I have not used Radio Userland. Radio (at USD $39.95) comes with hosting for a year, and iWeb (at USD $79 as part of the iLife suite) can be combined with dot-mac (“.mac”) which has a yearly subscription, for hosting.
[posted with ecto]
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