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Question: Small Firm Private Blog?
Below is a question I received from a friend, and since I don't really know the answer, I thought I'd see if anyone else does. My friend writes:Does anyone know the best way to accomplish what my friend seeks? I know that WordPress allows you to password-protect posts, but I'm not sure if that would be secure enough for a private, small firm blog. I'm thinking they need some sort of intranet or otherwise secure network. If they ran their blog off of their own server and required a password to access the server, then a blog would work fine, wouldn't it? But then, that could be a little costly to buy and run a server, couldn't it? Or could you do this with a virtual server (shared hosting) with htaccess or some more secure password-protection for the directory in which the blog resides? Obviously, this question is a bit over my head. For those of you with more knowledge than I, please leave any suggestions in the comments or send them via email so I can pass them on to my friend. Thanks!Is there a way a small civil rights type law firm could get a free or extremely cheap blog that could be personal to them? Or is blogging essentially public? There has been talk about trying to have some sort of newsletter that people could easily post to, with comments about whats going on with them, their clients, their kids etc. but it would HAVE to be private as client information would be internally discussed......not a blog?
Posted December 18, 2004 12:01 PM | law general meta-blogging
I'm sure they have some sort of intranet already, even if its just a file or print server.
It wouldn't be too hard to run a blog or some other content management system on that server -- things like zope and plone are standalone webservers.
Then they need to make sure that this server only serves pages internally -- behind whatever firewall they have. The disadvantage would be they couldn't access it from home/away.
The only other solution would be a login type system to a closed message board. PHPNuke and other sorts of software will run message boards, and you can set the permissions and logins to control who gets in. The problem here is security -- if this is compromised, it is out there on the internet behind only whatever security this message board provides.
Posted by: luminous at December 18, 2004 12:34 PM
you don't need a full CMS or (heaven help you) a slashdot clone, and if they don't have the interest in running their own server, why bother looking at Plone, PHPNuke, or anything like that? lots of corporations are looking at internal-only blogging and wikis as content management systems. this is not new territory, and they're not looking at sophisticated CMS systems.
look at what ross mayfield and his company socialtext.com are doing. they do hosted blogging services for internal only use (they host the server and lock it down to be visible only frm your site).
typepad offers password protected blogging, ie for reading and for commenting. that's probably your best bet. i don't know if blogger does that. i have been extremely happy with typepad's service, price, and terms.
what they need to do is look at what it is they're looking at doing, what goals they want to achieve. blogs are great for a publish only medium, but for easy knowledge capture they should look at something like a wiki. socialtext is one of the only reasonable places i know of doing hosted wikis. i've used their stuff and i can say it's fantastic.
i wholeheartedly agree with the idea of having it hosted somewhere, so that they don't have to deal with the burden of running their own infrastructure.
Posted by: jose at December 18, 2004 03:04 PM
I have a lawfirm-only weblog on typepad that's password protected. The dialog box for the password pops up the first time you access it, then you can check a box that says "save the log-on information" so that's it's easy to access again. I don't put anything confidential information on it, but nonetheless, it's only for law-firm use and it works fine.
Posted by: Evan at December 18, 2004 05:10 PM
Spaces, by MSN, is free and can be protected so as to allow only certain users with MSN (hotmail or passport) accounts. But it's really limited in changing stuff, so I wouldn't really recommend it. But it IS free. Blogger doesn't do the password ones anymore.
Posted by: E. McPan at December 18, 2004 05:24 PM
This is easy... I set up a blog for a friend where the homepage was available to everyone, but archives were in a directory that was password-protected. Just using .htaccess to protect the sub-directory (in his case, /archives) meant that the full text of posts was only visible to those with the password. (The home page showed just the first paragraph, kind of a teaser...) I used Movable Type for this, but it's easy enough to do with any blogging app where you have enough control over the server to set up an .htaccess file.
Posted by: Rick Klau at December 21, 2004 10:50 AM
