EasyBlog

From Newt

EasyBlog SWOT (http://www.elka.cz/easyblog/)

In a break from tradition I'm, going to start with the weaknesses as they are so damningly critical for this software.

Weaknesses This software did not work correctly. It would not render the html output pages that are then to be FTP' to hosting. There has been no active development on this software since 2005. The download website and help documents are in Czech. The interface seems to get stuck at various points and needed frequent excursions into the task manager to forcibly kill the process before restarting. It provides no help with hosting the resulting blog output. Plug-ins so that visitors can leave comments on the blog also wouldn't work. Managed as flat files rather than as a database backend. This would lead to things like comments being difficult to manage and probably why there was no RSS support that I could see. It has a higher entry barrier (have to arrange own hosting and ftp access) than a managed service.

Strengths - based on if the software had of been able to produce any output. As this software (should) only produces the blog files, and you have to choose your own hosting, this frees you from quite a lot of the imposed terms and conditions that accompany blog services. (Although some may be imposed by your hosting provider) You should always maintain total control of the blog and can freely move it. I do quite like the idea of a tool that lets you write your blog offline and then upload it to any website.

Opportunities There is always the chance the author may resume work on the software and create a fantastic product that is better than any other, although I imagine that after 2 1/2 years of stagnation this is unlikely.

Threats I think that this software has already succumbed to the threats that arose from hosted services such as blogger.