Need a SEO Friendly Blog script

Hello I am looking for a blog script that I can run on a Windows XP Box that will provide SEO Friendly URLS just like if I used IISrewrite or Mod_rewrite. For some reason, we cant use IISrewrite on the server so I was curious if there was an out of the box solution we can use. Any recommendations or am I am going to be moving this site to a linux server? I really dont want to do that.

What languages do you have available? I presume you're using IIS rather than Apache? Does it have .Net or just ASP?

If you have Perl available you could use Movable Type.

You can use Blogger.com and have it publish the posts to your site through FTP, that works on any platform.

Thanks for getting back to me Paul. I am running IIS and have
.NET Framework 1.1, ActivePerl 5.6.1, and ASP

How could I make it work with Perl and Movable Type? Do I need to make some serious server changes because my host probably wont let me.

Thanks... I've been looking at the Movable Type install instructions at http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/windows and it looks like you need MySQL or PostgreSQL, which you probably haven't got access to. If you have, have a read as it doesn't sound too bad (also Google for 'movable type ActivePerl' as there's loads of helpful pages.)

.Net solutions I've found:

Community Server :: Blogs looks like it's worth keeping an eye on, but it's not due out until the Autumn...
http://www.telligentsystems.com/Solutions/OpenSource.aspx and http://scottwater.com/blog

It's grown out of .text, which is available from here:
http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?ID=E99FCCB3-1A8C-42B5-90EE-348F6B77C407
and runs this blog which has search engine friendly URLs: http://weblogs.asp.net/rhurlbut/

So you could try .text to see how it is, and wait for Community Server :: Blogs to come out.

Alternatively you could look at DasBlog:
http://wiki.shahine.com/default.aspx/DasBlog/DasBlog.html
But I couldn't find a working version to check the URLs.


I'll ask some mates who do more Windows-hosted stuff and see if they know of a package. You'd have thought the web would be swimming with blog software using ASP and Access, or even flat files, but most of the big names all seem to be LAMP based.

This is all good stuff, I actually have access to MySQL so I am going to look into the first solution. The ones look interesting, Im gonna try them out a month after they are released.

I was always under the impression that blogs where search engine friendly to begin with?

Not all blogs are built the same. Some have very unattractive URLs with lots of garbage in them (e.g. MSN Spaces), some have nice URLs which let you put keywords in them. Some have horrible HTML behind the scenes, others have very clean, semantic HTML that can help promote the keywords in your headings. Some will ping services like weblogs.com for you (which helps get you spidered quickly) other's will leave that up to you.

Some search engines like sites that constantly get new content, blogs are a way of easily doing that on a site, and it'll help if you're using some blog software which gives you the optimum on-page factors rather than missing out on them by using something crap.

I am sure there is nothing better than wordpress.
Wilh a million programmers using it, wordpress has some cool plugins which make it unique.

Any particular software in mind?

As others in this thread, I'm finding WordPress to be very good. Especially when set up on Linux hosting with mod_rewrite so you can turn on the search engine friendly URLs option in the admin area (NB: it might give you some code to cut and paste in to a .htaccess file when you turn this on, or it might be able to make the file itself, it depends on your hosting.)

You just need to make a .htaccess file that is writable, and Wordpress will insert the code without you having to copy and paste it.