use cases behind single/multi-blog support

On 3/6/07, Brody Pierre <brodypierregmail.com> wrote:
> So a blog-server admin would naturally want to host
many bloggers. I'm
> thinking of something like blogger.com , although
presumably specialized for
> some niche.
>
> What motivated the decision to support one blogs (now
moving forward to
> supporting a few)? What are the use cases that made
Typo and other blogging
> engines work this way?

I'm guessing that it's because building thread-safe code
which can
deal with hundreds of simultaneous requests for hundreds of
different
users' blogs, and do it all securely, is hard. Much easier
to set up a
separate Unix account per customer. That way you get:

- Stronger security, because it's enforced at OS level. You
don't need
to worry (as much) about user X injecting some SQL and
wiping out 200
customers' blogs from your database.

- Better ways to manage disk and CPU usage (e.g. run 'and'
to stop one
user's blog soaking up all CPU time)

- Ability for users to add their own CGI, deploy their own
applications

- Ability for users to FTP/FTPS in and edit their web pages
and
templates directly (*)

- Ability to scale indefinitely, as it's relatively easy to
move users
to less loaded servers transparently if you have to

Building all that into the application layer is a lot of
work
requiring lots of attention to detail. People like Google
and SixApart
have multiple full-time developers dedicated to their blog
software,
dealing with security issues that crop up, load issues, and
so on.

The (*) shouldn't be downplayed either. Users expect it.
Even cheap
$10 hosting from GoDaddy comes with a Unix account and FTP
access, so
why not use those accounts to segment your hosted blogs
too?

Basically, unless blogs are your entire business, I think
you'd be
crazy to invest in the amount of work required to support
lots of
users on a single software deployment.


mathew
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My $.02 ...

On Mar 6, 2007, at 3:39 PM, Brody Pierre wrote:

> Most bloggers don't want to run their own server-side
software --  
> they want a hosted solution , along with user
self-registration and  
> differentiation of blogs by URL path.

The authors of Typo did not  have the above audience in
mind. Nor are  
they particularly interested in building solutions to
problems that  
they don't have - they have plenty of work already. heh.

I'm not a developer or contributor, just a happy end-user.

 From lurking on this list for a while, I get the impression
that  
Typo was written to scratch a particular itch and that Typo
became  
useful and useable enough for others to pick up and start
using as  
well.  The authors wrote it for themselves and shared it
with others,  
most of whom were running locally hosted "single"
blogs at the time.   
This topic has come up quite a bit in the past and the
general  
consensus was that "multi-blog" support was not
something that any of  
the core developers had any sort of urgent need for or
interest in.

Typo's roadmap was motivated by the needs and interests of
the core  
contributors rather than market research and use-case polls.
As it  
happened, nobody was particularly interested in
"multi-blog" stuff,  
especially as other blogging engines are already doing that
quite  
well.  This could easily change (or not) in the future.

Apologies if I'm putting words in authors mouths ...

-Chris




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