Symphony, another blogging application now available

While the vast majority of bloggers choose to use an established service to publish their rants, there are those among us who want more control over the blog engine.  For that later group there are a lot of options, everything from dasBlog to Wordpress.  Most are open source, and therefore generally free.  This open source freedom allows people to custom tailor their rant-space to match their personality (or online personality).  You'd think with the growing strength of Wordpress, that developers would shy away from building other platforms, right?  And even if you developed a new blogging medium, you'd offer it up in open source format, right?  Enter Symphony.  Not only is Symphony a new blogging platform that you can download, but the developers expect you to pay $49.95, at least once for use of the system.  So, once you pay for one copy, you are free to reuse your Symphony as many times as you wish, just as long as you understand that support will only be provided to the 1st installation.  Interesting business model, I guess.

I took a test drive on Symphony a few days back, and besides a smoother interface and some AJAX funkiness, I didn't find anything spectacular about the software. As illustrated below, the developers were cutesy in labeling their menu structure as well:

Whereas $50 is not a lot of money to shell out, I just didn't see what the core value I'd get from paying for a simple blogging system.  Wordpress, however, unleashes the full power of the open source community.  There are a rich set of add-on features and capabilities that Symphony may never attain.  Still, if you are looking for a blogging script that has a simple, elegant interface, Symphony may be worth a look.

 

Tags: commercial