I’ve been thinking of turning my Ethnic Dining Guide into a blog. It would be searchable by category and would allow for comments. It would be updated regularly rather than every six months. Can you give me any software advice? Is Typepad the best choice? I need a large number of categories and the ability to update posts without spending huge amounts of time searching. And could readers print the whole thing out without it running into hundreds of pages? Comments are open…
Look at squarespace.com. It appears promising.
You could use MediaWiki, which is the same software that powers Wikipedia. (NB you do not have to allow others to edit the entries). It’s free software, and available at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki. It’s not a blog, per se, but I think it would work well.
I agree — a limited-rights wiki is the way to go.
I was going to suggest a rights-restricted wiki as well. PBWiki is the only thing ive played around with.
Though one thought: what I like about blogs is their interactiveness. ie: RSS feeds, trackbacks, comments etc… The other virtue of a blog is that there are many other “food” blogs our there that would track you blog, link to it, comment etc… I have not seen this level of interactiveness with a wiki. So I think that a blog with categories for (1) types of food, (2) stars/ranking, and (3) price range would be very effective.
… it would only be a matter of time before you were getting free meals.
WordPress, baby!
All the content is stored in a database, not static pages, so it’s much easier to massage. There’s also about 8 jillion plug-ins and it’s free.
http://www.wordpress.org
If you want more user involvement (which IMO a dining guide screams for), try Drupal.
http://www.drupal.org
I think the problem with a blog for this purpose is that a blog is organized by date of posting. There are usually ways to to mess with the software to organize by category or some other field, but it gets complicated.
Looking for a simple easy-to-use blogging CMS? Try WordPress ( http://www.wordpress.org ).
Looking for a full-fledged CMS with more bells and whistles and much more tweakable? Go with Drupal ( http://drupal.org ).
Hello dear honorable professor Tyler Cowen,
Please don’t pay any attention to the commentators above my own comment –and to the commentators below mine, too.
It’s obvious that what you need is an open-source HTML editor, like Nvu, so as to be able to set up a website from scratch, while being totally free to architecture the backbone of your dining guide.
http://www.nvu.com/
If you go to my website, you’ll see that stuff is archived by category first, and then by date. That’s what I chose. But there is an infinite number of possibilities. With an HTML editor, you’re free as a bird.
A wiki is an easy-to-use HTML editor. I don’t like its look and feel. Not professional.
With all the posts trumpeting their own products, this has all the makings of a great experiment in political economy. Let the bidding begin.
I use Squarespace for my business. The ability to add structure to the site – ie standalone text pages, forums, galleries is very powerful if you’re after something which offers more than just a blog.
tags seems like a good idea. then you could have the site searchable not only by type of cuisine, but also by location. or both. seems like someone in nova looking for good mexican (or whatever) on short notice has no use for montgomery county’s results turning up. making the site searchable by location would be ideal.
It depends what the site is about, you get a lot of rude idiots on the internet
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