Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Practice blog and blog app discussion

In my posting Hectic week! from Oct. 30th, I promised to post any good practice blogs I set up. I decided to play around more with my trial subscription on Typepad (a pablum version of Movable Type) before it closes down. Here it is if you want to check it out: conniecrosby.typepad.com . It is a trial blog for my book club. Unfortunately it will only be open until approx. Friday and then I will be canning it.

Looks great, doesn't it? I really like the look of it. Here are the reasons why I won't be continuing with this software:

- I used their terrific book list feature to set up photos and links to all 70 books my book club has read. I thought this was great until I loaded it onto the blog itself. Unless I show all 70 books on the front page (see down the right side), there is no way for others to view the archives of past books. I asked about having this added as a feature, but was told it would be low priority. Therefore, I am going to try to find a similar low-cost function somewhere else and add it onto a blog set up with a different shop.

- inflexibility of the application. I can't do much in the way of playing around with the look of it since they don't give access to the underlying HTML code. I LOVE Blogger for this reason. Apparently the grander software Movable Type is a lot better in this respect, but it would mean hosting it on my own server.

I have also been playing with WordPress in my Blogs course. It has the flexibility of Blogger, plus the complexity of Movable Type. It is free, open source apparently (so my instructor Amanda tells me). The only drawback is the need for a host; however, this gives more security. Right now Blogger can go down for the day or my blog can get zapped, and I would lose it all. So, might be worthwhile seeing what kind of hosting my Sympatico.ca subscription includes!

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