Belchfire Search Engine Marketing

Just for kicks I tried two more Blogging systems. Greymatter and Serendipity.

Greymatter was unique in some respects but from all accounts, hasn’t been actively developed since 2001 (but still has quite the following). I won’t get into it so if curious, just check out their site and try it out. Not for me.

But Serendipity… WOW. I can’t believe I overlooked it. While I still like WordPress, I’ve now switched to Serendipity. It has all the features I was looking for and like MT, has one of the most user-friendly admin interfaces I’ve seen. Supports SEF URLs and they are human readable. Dynamic page titles plus many other search engine tweaks. Not multi-domain but is multi-user with permissions so I can work with that.

It has the best Media library I’ve seen and uses Imagemagick to create thumbnails and rotate images, etc., rather than GD (which is not always present on many hosts and cannot be added without recompiling PHP). One-click theme switching, robust comment spam controls. More RSS feed options than you can shake a stick at (what exactly does that mean anyway?) - the list goes on and on. It’s also PHP/MySQL (which I prefer over Perl) and can import from over a dozen other Blogging systems and software (most excellent). It’s actively being developed and maintained (unlike many others) and I like they way they use CVS for plugins and such. It’s clear that alot of care and attention is being applied to the project and that’s what I want to see. Kudos to the Serendipity dev team!

So check it out - well worth a look. I’m a convert!