[cenutrio]

Title speaks for itself, any recomendation on sites specialized in blogs?

Thanks

[Mastrap]

if you want to use a hosted service to produce your blog, meaning you don't want to use your own server to run software such as Movable Type or Wordpress, then Blogger and Typepad are both good solutions.

[ort888]

You found it!

[Salty]

Blogger is my favourite.

[James L]

Blogger is really easy to use and quite functional.

[Daveecee]

Originally Posted by Mastrap

if you want to use a hosted service to produce your blog, meaning you don't want to use your own server to run software such as Movable Type or Wordpress, then Blogger and Typepad are both good solutions.

Although WordPress now has http://www.wordpress.com/ as a blog-hosting service, so you can enjoy the awesomeness of WordPress without having to have your own hoster.

[historylme]

Originally Posted by ort888

You found it!

[starman]

Originally Posted by James L 

Blogger is really easy to use and quite functional.

The problem with Blogger is that there's no current way to backup your blog. With MovableType, there's an export function so that you can backup your blog into a TXT file which you can later import in case something happens.

I've been trying out different blog methods and nothing's perfect.

MovableType - not easy to install if you don't know your way around a UNIX system. Once it's up, it runs very well. Easy to back up. Can't find a lot of skins for it.

Blogger - easy to set up, easy to use. Some functionality is hidden. No way to backup your blog. The closest you can come to it is emailing your blog entries to yourself and using them as your "backup". You can submit blogs from anywhere via email which is very nice.

iWeb - Nice, but the problem is that if you're in multiple locations, you can't update your blog.

Web-based blogs seem to be the best solution since you can blog from anywhere.

[residentEvil]

if you use blogger on your own site; you have backups. you mean when hosted on their own url space you can't back it up?

[starman]

^^ At first I thought you were on crack. "Your own site?". I did more research into Blogger and you're right, you can use it on your own site. However, if you use Blogger's URL, you have no backups. Sucks.

[residentEvil]

yeah, your own site

but not on their URL's seems odd, very odd.

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by starman 

^^ At first I thought you were on crack. "Your own site?". I did more research into Blogger and you're right, you can use it on your own site. However, if you use Blogger's URL, you have no backups. Sucks.

However, you can backup your template which is nice if you've highly modified it like I have mine. I have two Blogger blogs and I love them.

[starman]

There's also an issue of content ownership which people should be aware of when using sites like Blogger.

[turtle777]

MySpace !

Seriously though.

-t

[andi*pandi]

no one has said livejournal yet?

[Salty]

Probably cause live journal freaking sucks I have a few friends with live journals and it's like... just get a freaking blogger blog!

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by Salty 

Probably cause live journal freaking sucks I have a few friends with live journals and it's like... just get a freaking blogger blog!

Bah. I've had a LiveJournal since 2001. It's nice knowing that there is at least part of my online "life" that Google hasn't conquered.

[turtle777]

Bah. If I want to keep my private life private, I just don't post or blog it. Don't blame Google. Duh !

-t

[Salty]

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey 

Bah. I've had a LiveJournal since 2001. It's nice knowing that there is at least part of my online "life" that Google hasn't conquered.

That's why I have a flickr page haha. Actually I confess I decided to try Picasa... which on some levels I like... the icon for the service annoys me actually. I like that they have a plugin for iPhoto, Flickr unfortunately refuses to make their own and is letting some guy charge an arm and a leg for a plugin which I refuse to pay that much for (OK I'm really bad for buying shareware ever anyway) and they haven't made a universal version of Uploadr either. I love the fact that I can have an RSS feed of my photos in Picasa, really wish that feature were in Flickr.
I'm a lil frustrated that Flickr is a Yahoo! property since I'm not a fan of Yahoo! at all. But I just love the feel of Flickr, also that I get to upload as many photos as I want, I just can't see the ones that are more than 250 which is fine since all of those aren't that good anyway haha.

[shifuimam]

Originally Posted by starman 

The problem with Blogger is that there's no current way to backup your blog. With MovableType, there's an export function so that you can backup your blog into a TXT file which you can later import in case something happens.

Unless something has changed, all you have to do for Blogger is set the maximum posts displayed on each page to an arbitrarily high number (I believe you can do it in the template code). Cut, paste into TextWrangler, format as necessary, import into Journler, Word, Excel, whatever else.

Originally Posted by Salty 

Probably cause live journal freaking sucks I have a few friends with live journals and it's like... just get a freaking blogger blog!

LiveJournal had security controls long before Blogger, as well as a really nice RSS-type feature (the friends list) I still had a Blogger blog when I registered on LiveJournal, and the ability to lock posts from my family, certain friends, total strangers, etc, was very nice. LiveJournal, however, has no good backup feature. You can only export to XML or CSV one month at a time, which can take forever for a journal with more than a year or two of posts.

Also, back when LJ still required invitation codes to open a journal, people had a superiority complex about it (e.g. I'm an Early Adopter and you're not, neener neener neener). LJ breeds emo, Dashboard Confessional-quoting, big-sunglassed, crappy-haired high schoolers who can't shut up, so, yeah. It's a culture of its own, I guess.

Journler is a really excellent journaling client if you want to keep a private journal. It also has support for Blogger and LiveJournal.

Just my two and a half cents.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Bah. If I want to keep my private life private, I just don't post or blog it. Don't blame Google. Duh !

-t

I wasn't complaining about Google invading my privacy. Just the explosion of Google-owned web services in the last few years.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

LJ breeds emo, Dashboard Confessional-quoting, big-sunglassed, crappy-haired high schoolers who can't shut up, so, yeah. It's a culture of its own, I guess.

Oh, you should check out DeadJournal then. Now that's emo.

[andi*pandi]

Originally Posted by Salty 

I like that they have a plugin for iPhoto, Flickr unfortunately refuses to make their own and is letting some guy charge an arm and a leg for a plugin which I refuse to pay that much for (OK I'm really bad for buying shareware ever anyway)

I willingly and quite happily paid the man. It's a good plugin. It's also nice that I can blog a photo from flickr right into livejournal easy-peasy.

[Salty]

I just keep an extra icon in my dock and drag the photos to Uploadr. Or if it's just one I use Fidgit.

That said I don't like how Flickr and Blogger don't use the same CSS when I blog images, and if I go to edit it later in Blogger I get a crap load of tags and stuff. Therefore I just copy the URL and use it that way.

[shifuimam]

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey 

Oh, you should check out DeadJournal then. Now that's emo.

Ahaha I know. I think that any blogging site based on the open-source LiveJournal API breeds little kids. You lose street cred trying to do anything professional or legitimate on a LiveJournal.

I reopened my Blogger account for that very reason, but now I can't think of anything to write...

[starman]

So, I've been playing with Blogger. Damn, this needs to get fixed.

First off, some of the templates are nice, but most of them are sh*t. What's worse is that there are no tools to modify the templates. Yes, _I_ know how, but most people don't. So, if you want to change that maroon to sea green, unless you know HTML/CSS, you can't.

What's worse is that I found that Blogger's templates don't like it when you color outside the lines. What I mean by that is if you post an image or even text that goes past the right side of your alloted width, it bleeds, and if your sidebar's on the right, the sidebar covers what bleeds. I don't like being restricted like that. Now, going back to my point above, there's nothing to say "make the width of the body in this template 100 pixels wider". I've been playing with the CSS for 20 minutes and I KNOW CSS and HTML and I just can't get it right. Even still, I'd want my body width to adjust to my content, that's the POINT of CSS in the first place!

So Blogger, as convenient as it is, still sucks. At least for me.

So I was going to go back to MovableType, but I can't find templates for it at all. That means making my own CSS. Eh, I can do it, I just don't have time to so the site looks terribly boring.

I was going to use iWeb, but you can't modify a blog from two different locations. Sucks.

So here's what I'd like:

1) Accessable from the web.
2) Easily modifyable templates.
3) Easy uploads of images (eg: Blogger).
4) Backup, backup, backup!

Ideas?

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by starman 

So here's what I'd like:

1) Accessable from the web.
2) Easily modifyable templates.
3) Easy uploads of images (eg: Blogger).
4) Backup, backup, backup!

Ideas?

WordPress does it all. And it's free.

-t

[starman]

I just retried wordpress. It does NOT allow me to upload an image, just link an image's URL.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by starman 

I just retried wordpress. It does NOT allow me to upload an image, just link an image's URL.

There are tons of free plug-ins that allow just that.
AFAIK, the latest version of WordPress comes with that as a built-in functionality.

Are you on your own server, or are you using WordPress.com ?

-t

[starman]

Wordpress.com

When I click on the image icon, I get a popup box that only gives me a URL to enter in, no way to browse my hard drive.

[turtle777]

Can you install plugins ?

There are dozens that do pics and attachments handling.

I don't know about WordPress.com, as I run it of my own server.

-t

[starman]

Ok, I've been playing with Blogger and Wordpress the last few days.

Blogger is "blogging for dummies" which is more or less what I need. I've been doing web work since the days of Mosaic, but for blogging I don't need ubercomplicated crap; just a place to type and upload images. Blogger does that pretty well, and since I moved it to my own server, I have backups.

Wordpress is equally as good, but falls short in ease of use and the goofy, large serif and sans serif type in the dashboard makes it difficult to read. What Wordpress has as an advantage is the large array of custom templates available to it.

At first I was going to go with Wordpress, but then something happened that's been bugging the crap out of me. When I upload an image to Wordpress, by default it uses that image's thumbnail. What's worse is that if I tell it to use the original size, it scales it WAY down anyway. I don't even remember how I did it, but I eventually got an image in the editor in the size I wanted it to be in. Blogger automagically puts a link on your blog that fits the page, and if you click on it, THEN you get the larger image. I like that a LOT. Can Wordpress do this? If it can't then I'll have to go with Blogger.

EDIT: I just tried the WYSIWYG editor from Blogger on Safari. Well, there is none. Apparantly the mechanism to do that doesn't work with Safari on the Mac. Trying Firefox. EDIT: Firefox works.

/sigh

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by starman 

I just retried wordpress. It does NOT allow me to upload an image, just link an image's URL.

You can do this, at least in 2.x

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by starman 

Ok, I've been playing with Blogger and Wordpress the last few days.

Blogger is "blogging for dummies" which is more or less what I need. I've been doing web work since the days of Mosaic, but for blogging I don't need ubercomplicated crap; just a place to type and upload images. Blogger does that pretty well, and since I moved it to my own server, I have backups.

Wordpress is equally as good, but falls short in ease of use and the goofy, large serif and sans serif type in the dashboard makes it difficult to read. What Wordpress has as an advantage is the large array of custom templates available to it.

At first I was going to go with Wordpress, but then something happened that's been bugging the crap out of me. When I upload an image to Wordpress, by default it uses that image's thumbnail. What's worse is that if I tell it to use the original size, it scales it WAY down anyway. I don't even remember how I did it, but I eventually got an image in the editor in the size I wanted it to be in. Blogger automagically puts a link on your blog that fits the page, and if you click on it, THEN you get the larger image. I like that a LOT. Can Wordpress do this? If it can't then I'll have to go with Blogger.

EDIT: I just tried the WYSIWYG editor from Blogger on Safari. Well, there is none. Apparantly the mechanism to do that doesn't work with Safari on the Mac. Trying Firefox. EDIT: Firefox works.

/sigh

The WYSIWYG editor now works in Safari ini WP 2.0.6, I believe.

On a different note, has anybody here played with Google Docs and Spreadsheets?

http://writely.com


Any comments?

[starman]

Just as I was about to pick one....

Now I have another issue. I can't find a solution to this in Blogger or WP, but I can do it in MT. I'd like the ability to have several different blogs. Like, one main one, a photos one, an art one, etc. MT does this easily, but Blogger and WP don't seem to do this at all. Suggestions?

[as2]

Doesn't the Apple iWeb app allow you to have multiple blogs?

I use nucleus on my own host so dont really know about others that provide hosting

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by starman 

Just as I was about to pick one....

Now I have another issue. I can't find a solution to this in Blogger or WP, but I can do it in MT. I'd like the ability to have several different blogs. Like, one main one, a photos one, an art one, etc. MT does this easily, but Blogger and WP don't seem to do this at all. Suggestions?

WP will allow you to work with several different blogs with a very minor tweak as long as you have the ability to create new databases. Otherwise, you can separate everything out by category and only display content belonging to your photos category, for instance, which is another way to achieve this sort of logical separation.

[TheIceMan]

Hey guys I've just set up a WordPress blog. Can anyone refer me to some nice, clean (and free) templates for WordPress, please? Thank you so much.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by TheIceMan 

Hey guys I've just set up a WordPress blog. Can anyone refer me to some nice, clean (and free) templates for WordPress, please? Thank you so much.

There are a ton linked off of one of the WordPress pages... Just Google them, you should have no problems finding tons.