Introducing…Blogware!

Today marks the end of the “stealth period” for the blogging software that my employer, Tucows, has been developing for the past few months. It really wasn’t a terribly stealthy stealth mode — thanks to the magic of referrer logs, Scoble found Boss Ross’ blog, which had just enough info for him to deduce that a new blogging tool was being built. Roland Tanglao then found out, and made an announcement that Ross had started his own blogging company and had hired me as an evangelist (I picture myself as a younger, goofier, programming-and-accordion-playing Guy Kawasaki). Although not quite correct — and hey, I can’t blame him, we Filipinos love to gossip (or as we say “get our tsismis on”) — Blogware became known to the general public.

Tucows is in the business of helping hosting services move bits better. Hosting, as our CEO Elliot likes to say, is like the construction industry. Unlike many industries out there, there are no “big players” with 80% of the market. In hosting and construction contracting, there’s a vast sea of providers, some with more market share than others, but there are no Microsofts eating up a sizeable chunk of the total customers. If hosting services are like construction contractors, then we want to be Home Depot. My own role in the company makes me Bob Vila (or, if you’re Canadian, Mag Ruffman, the sexiest home handyperson alive.)

Blogware services aren’t going to be sold directly to bloggers. Instead, we’ll be selling it to hosting services, pretty much the same way we sell email services, domain name registration services and secure certificate services. Hosts will then offer Blogware to their customers as just another thing that comes with an account: “You’ll get x email addresses, y meagbytes of storage, web space, and oh yeah…we’ve got a blogging tool too.”

Here are some screenshots…

The Dashboard, pictured above, is the first page you’re taken to immediately after logging in. It provides a quick report of some stats (number of articles, comments, trackbacks and authors) as well as listings of the last five articles, comments and trackbacks.

This is the Article and Photo Manager, the master list of articles and photos that have been posted to the blog.

The Favorites page makes blogroll and link management pretty painless. Favorites can be divided into groups — the group pictured above consists of people who link to me.

Although Blogware is completely database-driven — that’s right, blog pages are generated on the fly, rather than generated as static pages — it exposes the database through a filesystem interface. The interface is so “real” that you can even FTP into it. Pictured above is the File manager page.

Nearly forgot — here’s the Post Article page.

For those of you who are into what’s under the hood, Blogware is written in Ruby and uses PostgreSQL as its database. I’m going to try and get a Q&A interview with the developers, all of whom are very sharp and very nice guys. A filet mignon on a flaming sword to the developers!

For those of you attending BloggerCon’s Day 2, I’ll be demonstrating it to anyone who’s interested. We’ll also have a group blog that anyone at the Con can log into so that they can give Blogware a test spin for themselves.

If you have any questions about Blogware, feel free to ask away in the comments!