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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @02:25PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @02:25PM (#872641)

    Agreed. I admin WordPress on an older server and it's fine. I use Apache and it's not a problem. Tried nginx but too many things were too difficult (yes, whaaaa)

    Ah, so it's not just me then, I'm currently going through that..I've had wordpress up and running with Apache before without issues, nginx is proving to be a bit of a bugger...I even resorted to looking at examples online....it's scary how many of these break horribly on a very basic test install (an example of one WTF..PHP works fine *except* for wordpress, where it works apparently where and when it wants...) I'll crack it, though..or it'll crack me..

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @05:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @05:42PM (#872744)

    no, it was hard for me at first too. it's worth it, long term, imo.

  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 30 2019, @03:49AM (2 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday July 30 2019, @03:49AM (#872995)

    To be fair and honest, I'm somewhat lazy, er., efficient. I had been doing Apache for years, and nginx was very interesting, but so very different. A bit of a learning curve. Trying to get it to "play" php scripts was, well, odd, for me.

    Some of the reason for trying nginx was that I was running it on a fairly limited machine, but again, well-tuned Apache is running it well. php is the only slug, and it's possible the php scripts are not optimized well or at all.

    • (Score: 1) by krokodilerian on Tuesday July 30 2019, @06:38AM (1 child)

      by krokodilerian (6979) on Tuesday July 30 2019, @06:38AM (#873030)

      For anything that doesn't serve lots of requests, and if the machine is not very underpowered, apache+mod_php suffices. Otherwise, nginx is the way (and definitely worth it), but the comments on the learning curve are spot-on - I've been using it in different productions for a number of years and still can't do the rewrite/location rules by heart and always have to consult some docs.

      But at some point I suspect nginx will be the main game in town, and apache will get relegated to "application server", so getting familiar with it is a good idea.

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 30 2019, @02:50PM

        by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday July 30 2019, @02:50PM (#873113)

        But at some point I suspect nginx will be the main game in town, and apache will get relegated to "application server", so getting familiar with it is a good idea.

        That's good insight / advice. I find I'm quick at figuring things out depending on need. Server admin is a part-part-part-time job right now at best. I think I'd be okay with a full-time one, but that's not the current reality.

        I should look to see if someone has done a side-by-side comparison of Apache and nginx. I know they have, I just barely care!

        And yeah, as if Apache isn't already an application server, remember Apache Tomcat...