Judges

Today's blog is about picking a blogging service, and how to judge what service is best for you. (If you want to blog at all. It's fun, but it can be time consuming.)

When I first considered starting a blog, the first question that came to mind was: how? Or perhaps more specifically: where? As a novice in the ways of bloggery, I have limited experience to draw upon. For a supposedly technically inclined person, I am suprisingly ignorant of most "cutting edge" and "cool" new trends in technology. I like technology, but primarily I like it because it makes life simpler. ¹ Learning new technology on the other hand, takes time, and as a well-trained consumer, my first inclination is to want the results without investing the time required for preparation.

Fortunately, I had not only one, but several starting points. Drawing upon the examples of friends and family, I had four examples of ways (and places) to blog: Blogger, Vox, Myspace, and a website built from scratch. Conveniently, kind friends from movie group (Shane, Robin, Steve, and Beth.) have allowed me to link to their blogs, allowing me to demonstrate samples of each, as well as giving you a chance to get to know them a bit. Initially, I looked over each, and picked Blogger because it just looked simplest. In retrospect, I should have taken the extra hour and actually tried using each very quickly, just to get a more accurate feel of how they work. I'm getting to like Blogger, but in part I got lucky - I could just as easily have started using it without doing my research, and then got stuck with a program I didn't like. (I could have swapped sites of course. But then I'd lose my reader comments, and those are irreplacable, so...)

So, with no further ado, here are my observations.

Myspace appears to have massive options. I'm not very knowledgable in the ways of Myspace, but in my limited experience I have noticed that every serious myspacer has a very different, very multimedia site. The neatest thing I've noticed about myspace is that many users have a song that automatically loads when you access their account. Myspace also has a "neighbourhood" feature, you can easily link your myspace to your friend's myspaces, in a way that kind of resembles msn messenger. I am told that myspace is one of the fastest growing "cool" things among teenagers, so I probably should have asked one of my youth to give me a demo of how to use it. At a glance, it seems to me that myspace is much more than just a blog site. My result: I'm new to this, and I got confused by myspace's many options, so I moved on. To see some of myspace's many features, see Beth's site in the Links section.

Vox is probably the easiest to use intially. I found I was able to learn how to write and read a blog within a couple of minutes. Vox also has the interesting feature of being able to add links to sounds clips. If you have a means of recording audio, you can add a link that will play that file for you. Steve's blog (also in the Links section) demonstrates how this can be used to make an audio blog, which is a cool idea. Vox, like myspace, has a neighbourhood feature for linking to other vox users.

Blogger is what I picked at first, based on it's simple appearance. In actual fact, I found that using Blogger (as a writer) is a little more complicated at first than using Vox. Now that I've been using it for a few days, I'm getting to be pretty happy with it, but here's a few comments:

1) to access the editing page (as a writer), click on the site's logo. It looks like this:
2) this probably wouldn't confuse anyone but me, but when I revised a blog and republished it, it still didn't update (on my screen) until I hit F5 to refresh the screen. I'm guessing it was using old data from the cache? If you're not a computer geek, ignore this whole point.

What are the good points about Blogger?

1) It's VERY easy for visitors to read your blog. It's just a blog - no extra features - and that makes it very simple to use.

2) No advertising unless you add it yourself. This blows my mind. How do they pay for the space we're using on their site?

3) It seems to default to 600x800 resolution. This is good news for me personally, because on Vox or Myspace, I have to scroll right to see the part of the screen that is hidden. For hi-res users, you might prefer the reverse, but think of your low-res readers!

4) At a glance, it seems to be limited to a handful of default templates. In actual fact, they let you edit the html code directly! At first glance, I was intimidated by this, it seemed too much like making a site from scratch. (pah! and I used to call myself a programmer!) However, I was inspired by Ruth Ann's example. I didn't know how to add links, and she (not a programmer, so far as I know) very casually commented that "it's just html code, I just cut and pasted the links into my blog". Humbled, I did a little searching, and sure enough, it wasn't that hard. (Thank you Ruth Ann!) What, you ask, is my point? Since they let you edit the code, potentially, you can basically rework the entire site (almost from scratch) to suit your own tastes, and yet still keep the features you like. There are a couple of features about Blogger that I think are poorly done (can you say profile?), but with this ability I should be able to rework it to pretty much exactly how I like. That's very cool.

5) It's got a choice of about a dozen different style layout right out of the box. I went with a "scroll" look, but there are a number to pick from. (warning: if you are editing the html code, choosing a new layout will probably reset your changes, so back up first. But I doubt many new users will be editing the html anways.)

A website made from scratch offers perhaps the most features, but I have no idea how to build one. Robin's website on Geocities demonstrates the huge amount of features that you can build into a site. A custom website is a two-edged sword. It doesn't come with premade features like the ability to comment on journals, or automatic links to other blogs. On the other hand, it also doesn't come with some of the baggage either - advertising, links to the main site, forced usage of a layout that you don't like, etc. (Actually, Geocities usually does come with advertising. Robin, how did you manage to disable that? Do you plan to make a fortune selling the secret?) :) In my case, making a custom site wasn't an option, though I think this is an excellent choice for someone who knows how it's done.

A hybrid site is also an excellent choice, one that didn't occur to me until I saw it. Shane has custom made website, with link to his journal. It's a brilliant way to get the best of both worlds, and it can be done in reverse as well. For example, you can start with a blogger site, and then later add links to a website to add surveys, sound, or whatever.

Keep in mind I've not really used Vox or Myspace extensively, so there is a lot I don't know about them. Beside the services I've listed, I'm sure there are many fine blogging sites. My goal here is to simply give you a starting point. Also two pet peeves: it seems every blogging service wants to take my profile and turn it into hotlinks to other profiles. It looks terrible! The goal is to create an artificial community by linking profiles with similar hotkeys. I'm not yet convinced that I want to share my blog with every stranger on the net however, so this isn't a selling point. (Though there is admittedly some appeal to the world reading one's blog, just to see how far it spreads, if it spreads at all.) The other pet peeve is that every service reserves a sidebar column for links and such...which means that as you scroll down past the sidebar, it turns into wasted space. Most people wouldn't care, but one day I'll have to talk to the html gurus among us (Grant? Shannon? anyone?), and find out if and how it can be improved.

Whew! That went much longer than planned. So much for getting to bed early. :(

You know what's great about blogging? You can be long-winded as much as you like, and nobody complains. In real life, you'd have to stick to the point, and get it out quick before someone changes the subject. Here, they can just skip over the boring parts and you still get the feeling that you've said your bit in full. Because it's YOUR bit, so obviously it must be tremendously important, and to shortening it would be a terrible waste. (And as is often the case: I've used the term "you", but of course it applies even more so to myself.)

It occurs to me to wonder what it is about us, that we so badly want to express ourselves. What need is being met when we do? The need for attention? To be understood? And why is being understood so important to us? I really don't have a ready answer for these questions, and would be quite pleased if someone could offer me some insight on this topic.

As a side note, do you have any idea how many bunny trails my brain takes on any given page of text? For example, in the first paragraph alone, the following topics were considered, and rejected, on the basis of that I'd get totally sidetracked from my main point:

1. Thoughts on if it's time to change title themes, and puns based on "Judging Amy".
2. Ideas (and research) on variants of the word acolyte. My sister Dina used it in an email recently, and I was tempted to try to match her bid with words such as neophyte or proselyte. It seemed incorrect to use either however, in part because I cheated (using dictionary.com) to find them. I then considered using a simpler opening statement along the lines of "...as a recent convert to blogging...", and eventually settled for the word "novice", which didn't really have the oomph I was looking for, but oh well.
3. I wanted to make a side comment on how technology doesn't always make life simpler, but again, it was too much of a sidetrack. Normally I'd put a bunny trail in ( ) brackets, but this one was too long, I'd lose my main point. I then decided to footnote it, but the editor doesn't support superscripts! However, it does have an "edit html" button, and the code for superscripting was actually very easy to find on the net. The other problem, I realized, was that since there are no real "pages", only screens of text, all footnotes actually become endnotes. So I trashed the explanation, but then decided to keep a tiny piece of it (see below) just to show off that yes, I did figure out how to do it. :)

¹ This isn't entirely true.

You know what? After spending over three hours on this, I almost lost it by clicking the wrong button on my browser. Maybe I should be writing my blogs in Word (with autosave on!), and then pasting them here when I'm done! Or perhaps save drafts every so often.

Good night!