I just noticed that one of Facebook’s native applications, notes, has incorporated the main feature of Flog Blog — displaying a blog feed. You can now import blog posts into Facebook.
{January 30, 2008}
Comparison of different blogger services
This is probably my fifth or sixth blog. Yes, I’ve started other blogs before, but under other names or simply incognito as far as possible. I’m just experimenting with different blogging tools. They all have varying degrees of usability and limitations, which are generally useful to know.
So far, I’ve tried:
1. A proprietary (but free) blogging service which was very limited, but still useful for its probable intended purpose and audience.
2. LiveJournal – The paid and plus accounts don’t offer anything that I really want. I’ve experimented with their plus account on several occasions. Having several userpics are useful up to a certain limit and very occasionally are polls handy. What I do love? The communities, the friends page and relatively fine grain post locking for both community and personal blogs. The links on usernames point to individual blogs which makes more sense than Blogger’s link to profile. Then again, Blogger is running on a different model.
3. Blogger – Being able to add third party widgets easily is a big plus. So is the ability to add custom javascript. Unlike LiveJournal, you can easily modify the theme and template of your Blogger blog for free. The flexibility is very convenient although I’ve only scratched the surface so far. I need to read Blogger’s documentation further to make sense of their tags and add my own customisations. You can browse other blogs but they’re not arranged according to interest groups or topics. Attaching multiple blogs to a single profile seemed attractive initially but I quickly discovered some drawbacks to this. You don’t necessarily want to put a up the same profile write up on both blogs. Also, if you’re commenting on another’s blog, you need to have a public profile in order for the other party to check out your blog. Again, to me, this is a detriment because I don’t necessarily want to show everyone which blogs I post. Their interface isn’t entirely dummy proof either. Without reading through their documentation thoroughly, I still haven’t worked out how to add external links separately or how to add podcast/videos to my blog seamlessly.
3. Typepad – they don’t have a free service and I’m not keen on paying money unless I’m somehow making money off my blog. To date, no one’s given me money to write on a regular basis.
4. Word Press – lots of interesting plugins that I will have to try. Widget support isn’t so widespread compared to Typepad and Blogger. The built in stats page could be quite interesting. I’ve stuck google analytics and some other statistic tracking code on my Blogger page — it may still be early days yet but it’ll be interesting to compare traffic/viewership flows. Already, I’m seeing some patterns to the kind of things people are likely to be searching for. I’ve only just started with WordPress so I’ll have to update this at a later stage. The interface for adding videos/podcasts/music/miscellanous media appear relatively painless compared to Blogger, even though I haven’t tried this feature yet.
5. Others – I’ve seen lots of these out there through browsing on the Internet. None of them look terribly interesting though. They’re usually tacked on together with some other service provided, as with the case with some social network sites like MySpace (for musicians) and Friendster. Or Xing and a plethora of clones out there.
