“Blogs do not even have to look like blogs, they can work however you want them to. Many people object to blogs because of “that front page with all the articles on it” or “I don’t like the archive based navigation” yada yada.

People who say “blogs must”, or “blogs can’t” or “blogs always” are probably overwhelmed with information and don’t want you to take their security blanket away.

Blogs can look or work however you want them to. It’s just a content management system and if you choose the right software, for example WordPress, then the only limitation is tweaking time.”

I used to be very much against Blogs — it was “cheating”. I preferred to write webpages the good, old-fashioned way: by hand in Notepad. But then reality caught up with me and I’ve realized since that with multiple obligations competing with my time, the use of a blog/cms platform like wordpress might be OK afterall. So I’ve made it that far — I’ve accepted the concept, but my personal site is still hand-coded and not updated since eons ago. One of these days I’m planning to setup wordpress and modify it for various cms-type applications, including a (gasp) weblog. One of these days. This article addresses an interesting topic.

(P.S. Killer Flagship Content is a great read!)

Search-This was once a forum (with over 2000 members). But it became such a pain in the butt to run, moderate, and fight spam all day that I decided to pull the plug. That and the fact we really didn’t provide any service that people couldn’t get over at SitePoint.

Just a heads up – a successful forum can be very difficult.

You know how groups are, the crowd, the clic, the gang… They all have their own sets of rules and standards they have chosen to abide by. Over time, that set of standards either gets interpreted by a minority to mean something it doesn’t, the group decides that its way is superior to every other group’s way of doing things and tries to enforce its views upon others, or worse (as I believe the case to be with bloggers in general) both.

I’m not saying that all bloggers or all Web designers are guilty of this (only a few may lead afterall), but there are those who become self-styled authorities. While some truely know what they’re talking about (like Chris for example) others don’t. It’s these people who are harmful to the health of the community as a whole, and it’s up to those who safeguard the best interests of the community as a whole to shephard the masses from the wolves (so to speak).

So how do we go about doing this? First, we have to get rid of the security blankets and expose people to the truth. Some may not like it, others may embrace it, but I think it needs to be done, and done soon.

I didn’t expect there would be such strong negative feelings towards blogs. I won’t say that it’s as bad as the “I hate Flash” people, but their is still a big crowd.

AND WordPress writes nice clean code, many other CMS do not

Wordpress will write whatever you put into it so it’ll depend on the author how clean or otherwise it is. But I take your point that not all CSMs give you that option.

I must say the subject of this article’s not a dichotomy I’ve encountered much myself. Most of the business people I’ve suggested adding articles to their site aren’t even aware of what blogs are and don’t have any preconceived notions about what they should or should not do.