REALLY Simple News/Blog System or Script?

[Makosuke]

This is one of those things that's been bugging me for a while and I haven't found a good solution to. I've set up several websites for people who want to be able to add a little news post to the site with a simple archive.

Functionally speaking, a generic blog. Certainly no shortage of options there.

My issue is that everything I've tried is just too much--they're designed for comment systems, timestamps, tagging, trackback, large archives, etc. I really just want somebody who doesn't know how to write HTML to be able to add a news item once every six months or something.

Sure, I could use Blogger or WordPress for this and just strip all the unnecessary stuff out of the template, but it still just seems like overkill to me. Plus, in the case of something server-side like WordPress, there are security issues if you're not keeping up with updates, and I'd really like a "set it and forget it" system.

Here's an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about:

http://www.hnclt.org/

Three news posts in as many years, NO fancy formatting or such. I just can't bring myself to install the full WordPress system for this.

Is there a good alternative that I'm overlooking here?

 

[Peyton]

I'm not sure how savvy you are but Cpanel has a lot of options (if your host offers Cpanel)

Also, Fantastico has the great scripts. I use Lunarpages.com for my hosting and they are brilliant. Hope this helps, I'm pretty sure fantastico comes with all Cpanel accounts not just lunarpages, but I could be wrong.

 

[tominated]

get one from inserit.com. you can do all the designing, and then add the script/php that they supply. BTW: it's free

 

[desenso]

At three news posts a year, it's not worth the strain on the servers to have to process items in a database. Just update the HTML by hand...

There's a fantastic new VERY SIMPLE blogging system called SimpleLog if your host has Ruby on Rails. It has some of the extras (comments, pings, etc) but they're generally disabled by default. It is, literally, for very simple blogging sites.

- Scott

 

[Makosuke]

Thank all three of you for the suggestions; the host doesn't offer CPanel, but they do have Ruby on Rails, so I'll check out SimpleLog, and I'll also read over Insertit to see if their system is easier to template than Blogger.

At three news posts a year, it's not worth the strain on the servers to have to process items in a database. Just update the HTML by hand...

Were it my site, this is what I'd do, but my problem is that I'm handing these sites off to people who have no technical experience, no money, and no IT people--I'm already volunteering most of the design, so I don't want to get bugged for additions periodically.

Same reason I don't want to just strip down a WordPress template--they're not going to have anybody keeping an eye on the site most of the time so I don't want them to get hit with a security hole.

There is definite appeal to anything that builds static pages, which is why I kinda like Blogger--it can publish static pages via FTP. Haven't seen any blog/news systems that can do this well, although WordPress does at least do caching.

 

[Tehy]

Check out sNews http://www.solucija.com/home/snews/

I'm using it here: http://www.sefanatics.com

 

[Flowbee]

I just came across Tumblr. Very simple, clean, no-frills blogging.