Running Weblogs with Slash (Paperback)

~ (Author), Brian Aker (Author), David Krieger (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Suitable for both Web and Perl developers, Running Weblogs with Slash provides a lively and thorough tour of how to get started with your own moderated Web log community powered by Slash 2.0, an open-source content-management solution.

With sometimes arcane online help (or the lack of it), open-source software is often tough to master, and Slash 2.0, the open-source Web log software package, is probably no exception. Written in a notably clear--and often entertaining--style, this title provides an insider's view of what works best with Slash. Starting with the history of the software behind Slashdot (www.slashdot.org), a popular developer Web site, the authors trace the evolution of Slash as an open-source software package. While this is interesting reading on its own, you'll also get acquainted with the concepts behind a moderated Web log, where individual users contribute content which is edited for others in the community.

A chapter on installing and configuring Slash (along with Apache and Perl support) will help demystify the process of getting started. The authors include a suitable level of detail here, which should help newbies get started with Slash without much trouble.

The heart of this book looks at how Slash works and what features you'll need to master to run a Web log effectively. You'll master basic Slash terminology (like "authors," "moderators," and "stories") and the process of getting different users to contribute, edit, and post content to a site. The in-depth coverage of different configuration options available in Slash will help you customize your site, while taking advantage of built-in features (like user polls, for example).

Slash moderators not only edit and police content, but "meta-moderation" ensures that moderators' behavior can be adjusted on the fly. The authors discuss how all this works (including earning and losing "karma" points). There's also plenty here on the nuts and bolts of managing your site--whether it's getting new content, controlling abuse, or filtering out the bad stuff (using regular expressions)--in order to keep your Web log running smoothly.

Later sections dig into how to customize your Slash site, from using basic content options (like Slashboxes to display stories) to how to customize the look and feel of your site. Advanced material on ways to tweak Perl scripts provides even more options for developers. For programmers, the book concludes with handy references to the architecture, database, template language, and Perl APIs used within Slash.

Written with notable wit, Running Weblogs with Slash will allow just about anyone to get started with Slash successfully, whether you want to run it out of the box or do more heavy-duty customization. Along with some valuable technical detail, it provides an in-depth look at one of the most intriguing open-source software efforts to emerge from recent online culture. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Introduction to Slashdot, Web logs, and the Slash open-source project; overview of the Slash user and author interfaces; the Slash publishing cycle, installing and configuring Slash (including Apache and mod_perl hints); basic administration tasks in Slash (editing authors and configuration variables); editing and updating stories (basic story-editing options plus linking stories to other content); reviewing and approving submissions; comments and filters (including using regular expressions to filter submissions effectively); content moderation (including criteria for allowing moderation rights for users); meta-moderation (evaluating moderators, plus karma points explained); guidelines for topics and sessions (including choosing icons); hints for managing Slash communities (establishing tone, how to choose stories, finding content, site promotion); managing authors and users (the self-governing moderation system); deleting stories and anti-abuse features; customizing Slash sites (the Site Block Editor); headline swapping with XML, RDF, and RSS; Slashboxes; managing user polls; advanced customization techniques (changing the look and feel of your site); using templates and banner ads; themes and plug-ins (including the Slashprint plug-in); hints for customizing Perl modules in Slash; internationalization tips; advanced administration techniques (tweaking daemons used to run Slash tasks); Slash utilities (including template-tool, and runtask); and appendices for Slash architecture, database tables, template language reference, the Slash APIs, and configuration variables.

Product Description

Slash is the open source software system that drives the hugely popular Slashdot web site and many others. Slash implements the kind of web site that has come to be called a "weblog": a moderated list, in reverse chronological order, of timely items with links to further discussion on-site, or to further information off-site. Essentially, a weblog is a cooperatively authored daily newspaper for some defined community on the net. Anyone who wants to get a weblog site up and running will want to read this book, particularly system administrators who may not have the time or the background to learn all about Slash by reading the source code. Content managers of Slash sites who want to be able to use the system more effectively will also benefit from this book, which organizes the knowledge currently distributed throughout the Slash source code, Slashcode web site, and mailing lists, and provides it in an organized package.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 282 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (January 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596001002
• ISBN-13: 978-0596001001
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,040,180 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good, In-Depth Guide to Slash, July 19, 2002

By	David Cross "davorg" (London, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Slash is the software that runs sites like Slashdot and use.perl. It's all written in Perl using the Template Toolkit with MySQL at the back end. Despite it being based on a number of my favourite technologies, I'd never really the time to get to know how it worked. Reviewing this book finally gave me the excuse to spend a few hours looking at it. I decided the best way to "test" the book would to be to try and set up and configure a Slash web site whilst reading the book.

The book starts by giving an overview of Slashdot - the site that the Slash code grew out of. This is followed by an overview of how a Slash site looks to the user and a brief look at the architecture of Slash. All very interesting, but it didn't get me any closer to setting up my Slash site.

That started in chapter 2, which is a guide to installing Slash. During this chapter I became aware that the book (or, at least, this part of it) wasn't really aimed at me. By this I mean that the chapter assumed that the reader knows less than I do about installing Perl modules, setting up MySQL databases and configuring Apache. I was fast coming to the conclusion the the book's target audience was people who wanted to run a weblog using Slash, but didn't really know very much about Apache, MySQL or Perl. This made reading this chapter very quick and in an hour or so I had a basic Slash site up and running.

The next five chapters look at the nuts and bolts of running a Slash site. They describes the processes of setting up authors, editing and updating stories, reviewing and approving submissions, dealing with comments and managing topics and sections. Again, I read all of this pretty quickly as the chapters were going over in some detail processes that I was finding pretty easy to work out from the layout of the Slash administration pages. One section stood out. In the middle of chapter 6 there is a discussion on how Perls's regular expressions can be used to filter comments. I found myself wondering how easily my assumed target audience would deal with this material.

Chapter 8 changes direction completely. This chapter discusses ways to manage the community that builds up around a successful Slash site. It was almost completely non-technical but, building on their ideas of what has made Slashdot so successful the authors present some interesting ideas on the nature of web communities. To me, this chapter alone justifies reading the book.

In chapter 9 we're back with customising your site, with sections on setting up Slashboxes (little areas of content that go down the side of a Slash site), exhanging headlines with other sites using XML and managing user polls. Again there's not much comlpex technical content in this chapter.

In the last two chapters we suddenly get very technical, looking at advanced site customisation and administration issues. In particular, when the advanced customisation chapter looks at plugins, it gives an example of how to write a plugin and this may well all be a bit confusing for the target audience I discussed earlier. This is aimed at someone who knows what they are doing when it comes to Perl and MySQL.

The five appendices act as a reference to the Slash codebase. They contain much in depth information about the database tables and the API exposed by the various Slash modules. Appendix C contains a useful introduction to the Template Toolkit, which Slash uses to create all of the actual HTML pages. There's a lot of information in this pages and they take up about a third of the book.

I suspect I've come across a little more negative that I intended in this review. I do think it's a very useful book and should be read by anyone running (or thinking of running) a site using Slash. My only problem is that is seems to be two half books joined together. The second half seems to be aimed at a far more technically literate audience than the first half.

But the bottom line is that I got my Slash site up and running and I know a lot more than I did about how to configure and administer it - so the book does what I wanted it to.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you want to run a community weblog, you need this book!, March 25, 2002

By	A Reader (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

Slashdot is, of course, the original community weblog: "a moderated list, in reverse-chronological order, of timely items, with links to further discussion on-site, or to further information off-site.".

What David, chromatic, and Brian have done here is write a manual for Slash, the open-source code that underlies Slashdot and dozens of other communities. Slash is by far the most powerful community weblog technology out there, so a how-to manual is especially important.

If you're looking into setting up a community weblog that members can use to share links and stories, Slash is the power tool of choice. With the publication of "Running Weblogs with Slash," David, chromatic, and Brian make it much more likely that your Slash installation and management will go seamlessly!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars interesting, but not really a blogging book, September 9, 2003

By	Frank Carver (Ipswich, Suffolk United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

"Slashdot" is one of the busiest sites on the internet. Part newspaper, part bulletin board, part personal journal - just a casual mention on Slashdot has been enough to bring major web sites to their knees. Slashdot has lead the way in the high-traffic mass-participation web, and the software is free to download. This book is about the ideas, challenges and designs which keep Slashdot working. Although the slash software is written in Perl, you don't need to read Perl; there's hardly any source code in the book.

When I first saw this book, I thought it would be dull. Who wants to read documentation for a bunch of Perl scripts? As it turns out, the book is mostly case study and installation/configuration guide. Although obviously aimed at people considering using the open-source "slash" engine for their own sites, reading about how the Slashdot administrators evolved their software to cope with such astonishingly high traffic is quite inspirational. There is a lot of solid wisdom for anyone involved in maintaining web applications on the internet.

If you are designing or improving a public collaborative web application and want to be able to scale to massive traffic, this book is an important addition to your bookshelf. If you are curious about the growth and internals of Slashdot, it's worth a read. If you want a theoretical discussion, code listings, or product comparisons, look elsewhere.