Blogger – the gateway to WordPress

Blogger with its minimal barrier to entering the world of self-publishing helps people understand the pleasures of blogging. Then it frustrates us with service outages, bad customer service, and the inability to backup data and years of work. Then we discover there is a world of highly configurable, open source content management systems freely available. We learn about a wiki and that they too abound in open source but wikis serve a different a purpose than CMS.

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] [1]) is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. …

WikiWikiWeb was the first such software to be called a wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called “Wiki Wiki” Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport’s terminals. According to Cunningham, “I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for ‘quick’ and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.” “Wiki Wiki” is a reduplication of “wiki”, a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for “what I know is”, which describes the knowledge contribution, storage, and the exchange function.

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A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to websites.

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I am a WordPress fan. WordPress has a shared solution similar to Blogger at WordPress.com and provides an open source solution at WordPress.org. The open source solution will give you more control but you will need to have a place to put your website which means paying for some hosting (which is cheap these days!).

On January 2nd I mentioned that Latte Man moved to WordPress. I should have also mentioned that Newscoma has moved to WordPress! Update your marks. Find Newscoma at http://newscoma.com/. Jon is still trying to get Katie to make the move away from Blogger.

There are other solutions. For great examples of Drupal installations, look at any of Tim’s sites. Anghus suggests that we take a look at Joomla.

Btw, if you are a programmer writing CMS systems, like I do, then this link to compare wysiwyg editors will be invaluable to you. I personally almost always end up with Xinha.