How to create a Blog

[GuyB]

Hi Everyone,

I want to create a blog on my site, do I need extra software or can I use Actinic v7?. Any knowledge or experiences would be useful.

Regards Guy

[pinbrook]

you could use brochure pages and fragments, or find some blog software to use

[jont]

If your blog is going to get large number of post navigation becomes the main issue and would swamp Actinic and force lots of site maintenance from you.

You can easily integrate any of the blog tools (WordPress, BLOGGER etc) into Actinic and use their database structure to maintain the navigation for you.

[GuyB]

Blogs

Hi,

Thanks to Jo and Jon.

I've had a quick look at Blogger and Wordpress and they look good, do you know if the Actinic Search function will work over the blog too or should I just forget that and think of the blog software as another application and just link to in via Actinic?

The thing I'm not sure about is will I end up with two systems to maintain and will the search engines be able to crawl my log as well as the actinic related pages?

Regards Guy

[jont]

do you know if the Actinic Search function will work over the blog too or should I just forget that and think of the blog software as another application and just link to in via Actinic?

Actinic will only search its own pages. You could add another search script into the Act_Primary to do a site wide search.

Best to think of the blog as additional food for the search engines as well as keeping customers up to date on new arrivals. Make sure you have good links from the blog through to the actual pages.

Maintenance is very simple - especially if you use Firefox as there are several plugins (Performancing is one) that allow you to post to the blog direct from the web browser. The blog software handles all the indexing, filing for you - so once set up all you need to do is type away. As the months/weeks change so does the indexing automatically. Very low maintenance which is why they are now so very popular.

I use BLOGGER on an Actinic site (you can tell blogger to store the info on your own site an not their servers) and the pages are very well indexed by Google with most having a PR of 3.

WordPress is probably favourable but does require a bit of setting up whereas Blogger works out of the box ... I went with Blogger purely due to the server not having the requirements for Wordpress

[GuyB]

Blogger.com

Hi,

Just an update, after looking at WordPress and selecting this as the best way to go, guess what my hosted server doesn't support MySQL and won't for a coupl of months.

So I've chosen Blogger.com and whilst is isn't as functional I can see why you chose it as it is so easy just to get going.

Thanks for all your help. Guy

[paulbeckett]

Hi

I would like to set-up a blog on my own Claranet server. Can anyone recommend software that works with Claranet. Wordpress does not work.

I really want my blog to be on my own server.

Paul

[jont]

You can host BLOGGER on the CLARA servers as all the database stuff is done by Blogger and the generated pages are then saved on your webspace so no need for the MYSQL facility demanded by most blog systems.

[paulbeckett]

Yep - thanks! I have set-up a blogger.com blog on www.kjbeckett.com.

Thanks.