Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Blogging Tools | by Adrian Cockcroft | April 20th, 2006

I've been using blogger for the last 18 months, it was an easy way to get started but now I don't see some of the features I want. The basic service has changed very little in that time, so it doesn't seem to be getting much investment and development.

The three missing features I see in other blogs are tags, a blogroll, and posting categories.

I want to have an easy way to add a series of tags to each blog entry, without having to create custom html. I did it once the hard way and don't usually bother.

I'd like a blogroll so that people can see which blogs I think are worth reading, but I don't want to edit my html template to get one, I want to import OPML or have a table to edit.

I'd like to be able to separate categories so that I can label rants like this separately from technical info on capacity planning, thoughts on the industry, personal stuff.

I like the web based blogger service, I can post from anywhere using any device (I've posted to blogger from Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac and Treo/palmOS). I don't want to host my own blog or have to install a blogging tool.

I use bloglines as an aggregator to read blogs, I could also use bloglines to host my own blog, since it does seem to have some of these features, and it would make referring easier.

What other options are out there, is there a slightly better blogger competitor that I should check out? Is there a way to migrate existing entries to a new blog? Comments requested...

Cheers Adrian
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3 comments:

  1. bloodnok8:54 PM

    blogger is free. bloglines is also free. there's a hosted version of movabletype, typepad, but i believe they want the grisbie for access. i use movabletype for my photoblog (and for the terminated spriggs rants). it's run on a hosting service, once the odious 1&1, now the equally incompetent webhostingbuzz. i can access the blog pages from any webbrowser anywhere. i've never tried it with a phone browser (don't have one to try) probably looks pretty pathetic. some of my friends prefer wordpress ...

    host it yourself, buddy.

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  2. jforonda6:18 PM

    Adrian,

    I've gone through the same thing. I'm just starting out so the number of my posts are much less than yours. However, I have a positive experience with WordPress so far. WordPress.com can host your blog for free but I opted to host it myself.

    My posts on my experience are here:

    http://jforonda.vintarinian.com/?p=8
    http://jforonda.vintarinian.com/?p=9

    James

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  3. Adrian Cockcroft6:38 PM

    Thanks for the comments, I'm taking a look at vox.com, seems to have the features I'm looking for, its a controlled beta site at the moment but I got on an email list a while ago and got an invite recently. I don't have anything up there as I write this, but its at adriancockcroft.vox.com

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