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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday July 29 2019, @10:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-do-YOU-use? dept.

Hello fellow Soylentils, I could use some of your insights and suggestions.

I am looking for a lean, mean, and safe open source solution that implements a small blog where I can rant and rave to my heart's delight to my two followers.

To set the scene, I am not looking for something big and/or unwieldy, which basically rules out the major platforms like Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. The software is going to be self hosted on my existing web server, which already runs Linux with Apache2, MySQL, PHP, Perl, and PostgreSQL (LAMPPP?) on a Debian platform.

I would like the following features:

  • Open Source
  • Safe (i.e. well tested against hacking)
  • Reuse of my platform components (see above)
  • Small server footprint (the server is, in fact, a Raspberry Pi 3B+)
  • UTF-8 compatible everywhere (not like some systems — cough /. cough — where comments cannot contain UTF-8 directly)
  • Sane use of CSS
  • Displays properly on all platforms (PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, ...)
  • Easy to set up
    • Select features (e.g. whether users can comment on posts or not)
    • Select a design (with a number of templates, preferably)
    • Tweak the design to include my details
    • Add menus (Home page, Archive, Contact, ...?)
    • Add pictures
    • Define how many entries on the home page before the oldest entry gets bumped to the Archive
    • Possible sidebar for non-blog information
    • Possibility of displaying adverts in the future
  • Easy to use
    • Log in (only going to be used by one user, me)
    • Make a blog entry
      • Enter subject
      • Enter and format blog text (font, size, colour, attributes, ...)
      • Upload and embed pictures/illustrations/figures in text with captions
      • Add links to text and pictures
      • Set the time when a post goes active (now or specific time in the future)
      • Publish it
    • Edit a blog entry
      • Change any and all elements of the entry
  • I am a bit ambivalent regarding user comments as I do want to moderate them but will only have time to do that in batches, which means that I may have unwanted comments on the site for some time or, alternatively, people will not see their comments displayed until I have accepted them some time later.

[Ed. addition follows.]

I am not familiar with the minimum resource requirements for running SoylentNews, but if it would not reasonably fit on a single RPi, maybe adding one or two more would suffice?

What suggestions do YOU have for our fellow Soylentil?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Monday July 29 2019, @12:03PM (3 children)

    by DavePolaschek (6129) on Monday July 29 2019, @12:03PM (#872593) Homepage Journal

    Huh, I'm yet to see something lightweight that display properly on 5", 14"-17" and 27" displays. That's the nature of the beast, different screen sizes have different ergonomics.

    The UTF-8 everywhere requirement is another tough one. Haven’t seen that in any hobbyist solutions.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @12:36PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @12:36PM (#872603)

    Are you sure? I've not written anything in the last 15 years that didn't use utf-8 throughout.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 29 2019, @02:07PM (1 child)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 29 2019, @02:07PM (#872629) Journal

      Last time I used PHP on top of MySql (about 4-5 years ago), I remember I had some hard time to get proper UTF8 through the AMP part of LAMP and back; fortunately, an one off effort at the beginning of the project. Don't know what's the status now.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @02:32PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @02:32PM (#872646)

        Hmmm, true that I've also fixed inherited 3rd party code without utf-8. Fix the encoding on the database tables, set apache with correct content type and use iconv functions for PHP (typically adding input validation). Moderate codebase can be fixed in a day, what project (other than a green one) has never done it?