Cutenews Blows - A Followup

Dec 23, 10:50 AM - and

There was a bit of controversy over my last entry, Cutenews Blows, so I decided to write a follow-up to it and explain myself, hopefully, a little better.

I decided to install Cutenews because I hadn’t used it in about a year, and that wasn’t indepth. The installation pretty much failed, four times, because I have never been able to install Cutenews on the first go. Ever. It’s happened on four different servers, through five or six FTP clients, and three different ISP’s and I could never get an answer as to why it always happened. After that hurdle was passed installation was a breeze. The new security check tried to hassle me, but I fixed it good with a FALSE value.

After finally spending twenty minutes trying to get in, I got in. I immediately went and started poking around in the configuration panel to see if the archives and RSS feeds really did exist, they did, and what they were like, they were horrible and or confusing. The archives are not your usual archives. Typically when someone says “Archives” you think of a page with a list of entries on it, sometimes organized by Category, Date, Year or Month, not a page of articles “deleted” on the bloggers whim.

So I went around checking to see if I could find out what the archives page looked like on a blog that actually used them, of which I found few. It turns out that the entries are arranged in a very odd way (by date and usually through a couple of days, with seemingly no other order at first), but only if the owner decides to archive the entries. If someone could please tell me how to find past entries that weren’t archived I’d appreciate it.

As for the RSS feed you have to set it up, there is a simple explanation but one that most people will likely pass over because they simply don’t care about whether or not they use an RSS feed. Of course, I’m sure that there are people who use Cutenews that know what an RSS feed is, but since Cutenews is commonly referred to as a program used to jumpstart someone into the world of blogging, the “install it yourself” method falls short. At least with something like Wordpress RSS comes on by default so therefore the visitors of every Wordpress blog benefit.

All in all I found out that Cutenews hadn’t really changed since I last really used it, three to four years ago, as I remember you couldn’t validate a Cutenews powered blog, but now you can. That’s at least a step in the right direction.

Are there better flat file programs that you can use? Sure! Is it ultimately a matter of personal preference? Well yeah, but when people who are using Cutenews because Wordpress was “too hard to learn” you start running into problems, mainly features that we’ve all come to expect from blogs based on our experiences from the user end with things like Movable Type and Wordpress. \

Does it do it’s job? I don’t think it does it as well as other flat-file programs, but that’s just me. Oh, and keep in mind that my observations were kept within a community, the teen community, of about 6,000-8,000 people, many of whom used Greymatter or Wordpress.

In the end keep it in mind that while a lot of people who use Cutenews are stupid, I’m only making a generalization and I believe that there are some intelligent users out there using it for the right reasons. Unfortunately it’s been abused by the stupid for so long that it now has a bad reputation and is in serious need of some updating to reflect the times. This isn’t 2003 anymore, we’re rapidly approaching 2007 and the face of the web has changed, albeit not in some respects. The programs and scripts we use should change to reflect that and it’s sad that Cutenews hasn’t made many advances since the last time I really used it, at least not as far as I can see.

If you liked this article then why not subscribe to the feed?

On older posts comments are usually closed, so if you'd like to discuss this topic with me then please contact me.

|