23rd World

My first blog post back in 2000 was powered by Blogger, though my site runs on WordPress now. A few of my client’s blogs are still powered by Blogger and everything still works great, helped in part by the fact that Blogger has changed very little. When Google bought Blogger in the summer of 2003 many people were left wondering why. Their questions remain unanswered, and then people wondered why Google has let Blogger stagnate the past few years as both blogging and blog software options exploded on the web. And now Google junkies and tech gossips will doubtless mull endlessly over the sudden beta release of the new, improved, Google-integrated Blogger.

Reminiscent of Flickr’s move to YahooID’s after their buyout, my Google Account was already detected and a link encourageming me to switch my Blogger user account was presented. Already, I like this. I use several Google services including Gmail, Calendar and Sitemaps and like most people, I’d like everything to be simpler and easier. Integration all communication tools holds great efficiency potential.

I doubt the redesign will have much impact on self-hosting bloggers…that is, people who run blog software on their webservers as opposed to a hosted version. WordPress and similar full blown open source software applications boast incredible flexibility, customization capabilities and user-based support. Where blogger could pull ahead is in your hobbyist and non-tech blogger realm. They must realize that as the three features the beta highlights are:

New ways to customize your template - Drag and drop page elements and easily change your template’s font and color scheme.

Private blogs -Create a blog visible to just your friends and family, not the whole world.

Labels -Give your posts a category label so that you and your readers can easily sort by topic.

All of these things essentially make it easier for regular (non web-coder folk) to customize their blogs.
The new template customization seems to use the concept of web parts - movable configurable zones, similar to your customized Google, MSN or Yahoo homepage. This will allow people a more organic way of customizing thier site and allow them to feel in control without knowing any code.

Giving users push-button ability to make thier blog private is truly brilliant. All the loud mouths (like me) that want to shout their business to the world are already blogging - those left that don’t have blogs are either uninterested, intimidated by the technology or are concerned about privacy. Way to read your target audience Google!

The label feature is really just Blogger catching up to everyone else. Labels are more commonly referred to as categories or tags. Google’s chronic use of the word ‘labels’ instead of the popularly accepted ‘tags’ is perplexing and possibly confusing for some folks (IMO - it really just irritates me).

Beta blogs are invite-only (no one invited me *schniff*) so for now head over to Google Operating System and TechCrunch for an inside look at the new blogging features.

This post is just some emails I’ve sent and resent. It deserves some editing for flow, but the info is good. Thought I’d put it out there cuase people keep asking! (Following is MHO and YMMV and all those other typical disclaimers)
Here’s an email I recently sent to a co-worker that wanted to start a blog:

Get your blog…if you use one that is hosted elsewhere, you can be
set up in about 2 minutes.
http://wordpress.com/ (they host for you. you can also install the
software on a server yourself, that site is http://www.wordpress.org
and that is what I use)
http://www.blogger.com/start another very popular blogging system.

If you don’t host your own blog, or even if you do, managing photos
is easy and fun with Flickr. In fact, some people use Flickr as their
blog…they just create a “group” and discuss things there or add
really long notes/descriptions to their photos.
http://www.flickr.com/

Once you start blogging, if you meet other bloggers and you want to
keep track of them, instead of remembering to visit a bunch of sites
you can just subscribe to their content using a feed reader (any blog
software you use will automatically generate feeds). Btw, you can
subscribe to the NYT, Seattle-PI and content like that too.

http://www.rojo.com - a new one, I switched from Bloglines.
http://www.bloglines.com - probably a little more stable, rojo is
new, but not as cool!

“I have been told today that I need to set up a blog for [an event] by Monday, and I have no experience in blogging whatsoever. Here are the requirements:

1. Multiple editors
2. Ability to make a page template that looks like our site
3. The ability to redirect the blog URL so it appears to be coming from our own website

Your easiest bet is to go with Blogger or Wordpress. I set up a
Blogger blog for a band many years ago and here you can see it
incorporated into their site with no problems:
http://www.jessesykes.com/notes/index.html

In this case there’s only one author, but they do support multiple authors:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=20

The wordpress.com public docs are pretty sparce, but I just logged in
to one I set up in 30 seconds to show people how easy is it (I’m not
kidding about the 30 seconds) and you can set up multiple blog authors
with different levels of authority with the click of the button. In
general I would say the admin area looks almost identical to the one
you install and host yourself:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_Design_and_Layout

I started with Blogger, it’s super easy, and you can always import to
Wordpress later if you wanted. (Most blogs allow export/import so
don’t worry too much about your first choice). You can customize the
look with both but I think that Wordpress offers you more
power/flexability as there are a lot of plugins and documentation on
tweaking it - of course that means more to learn/read too.

There are other choices as well, but I don’t have experience with them
(except for MovableType, which I didn’t care for in comparison).

It’s is seriously so easy to set up…you should try both and see what
you like better and what looks easier to adapt to your site.

Oh, for the record, typepad is very popular as well. And to clarify, wordpress.com (hosted) is to wordpress.org (you install on your own server) what typepad is to movabletype.

To expand on why I prefer Wordpress to Movabletype/Typepad, all the following are true of Wordpress:

• All services are completely free, the software is completely free.
• It’s easier to install on your server (if you go that route - it was way easier for me anyway…)
• Wordpress is supported by a huge and rabidly enthusiastic community - this equals free support and hundreds of cool plugins that you can use to extend and customize your blog.
• Movabletype may have improved since I used it, but I must say, since the release of Wordpres 2.0 and the Askimet plugin (installed by default), I have virtually no blog spam. If your blog ever gets hit you’ll understand why this is so important!

There’ve been quite a few reports about sites getting hacked, blogs and otherwise. ‘Spykidz ownz you’ is what you’ll see on many such sites. All the more reason to update to the latest and greatest in WordPress - currently 1.5.2. It addresses security issues, specifically xmlrpc.php, which seems to be the leak.