September 07, 2004

• My biggest advice: STOP USING 'BLOG' IN EVERY FUCKING SENTENCE. Sorry, I really hate that word. I am *this* close to writing a Firefox extension to replace all instances of 'blog' with a random zippyism, grammar be damned. If you want advice, ditch that whole hosted weblog thing and roll your own. Lot more flexible and fun, at least until you start getting more than a hundred hits a day. My best advice is of course to just rethink the whole idea. Do you have a really original angle to this web-journalling schema? At this point all the obvious niches have been claimed.
• Yes, even that one's claimed.
• I've used blogger for awhile on various blogs, and I'm in the process of setting a new one up, which I hope will be more permanent. So, a few thoughts: First, I dislike Hello for posting pictures. Although Picase, the parent app, is very useful for managing your local collection of photos, it leaves a lot to be desired as a webapp. Really, it's just hosting, and not much else. Flickr, on the other hand, is amazing. I love using it, and it's getting better everyday. You should Flickr, hands down. Second, I also dislike the haloscan commenting system. It's a popup, which is bad from the beginning, but that also means there's no permalinks to comments, which I find very irritating. Blogger's built in commenting system isn't the best, but it's certainly passable, and that's what I would use. It also has the benefit of being built in, and doesn't require a lot of fiddling to get it to work. I've played a little with w.blogger, but I've found it easier just to use the blogger interface directly. Maybe I should give it another go. Finally, check your mail. (",)
• My best advice is of course to just rethink the whole idea. Do you have a really original angle to this web-journalling schema? At this point all the obvious niches have been claimed. Incidentally, this doesn't have to be about web-journaling. My family is spread out across the whole country. We used to keep in touch via phone and letter. Eventually we moved up to email, and now we use blogs and webapps like Flickr. With that combination of tools, we are much closer than we have been in the past, despite our geographic separation. Some blogs--yes, I said it--aren't necessarily meant for public consumption, and don't need to fit a niche.
• Awrright, in that case might I suggest LiveJournal? They have some of the best commenting and community setups of hosted sites. And Flickr, sure. I don't think LJ has their photo hosting deal working yet, though I haven't looked in the last year.
• Brainwidth - many thanks for the invite, and your useful comments, which were exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. fuyurgare - sorry about my excessive use of the b-word, but 'online journal' seems too restrictive and at least b**g gives an idea of the breadth of styles. LiveJournal looks interesting, but I want to avoid spending money on this for the moment, and I don't know anyone with an Livejournal. Wordpress might be worth considering in the future. Really the idea behind it was a way of introducing interesting links / content to a group of my friends/family who don't necessarily go looking for stuff on the internet but would be interested in certain sites, I don't anticipate a loyal audience and a book deal or anything.
• Livejournal's photohosting works now.
• LiveJournal doesn't have signup codes anymore; you can just start an account. However, it is widely considered to be the scum of the internet, a kind of sub-sub-basement to AOL; signing up wipes out one's internet credibility for ten generations, so one might want to be aware of that. Blogspot seems to be pretty easy to use these days (it used to be a bit clunky, but it seems shinier now), so that may be a painless way to get started.
• Oh, and the obvious downside to both blogspot and livejournal is the inability to effectively export your entries. If you wanted to leave either service and move to typepad or your own installation of MovableType or Wordpress, it might be kind of a pain. Just a thought.
• livejournal is the inability to effectively export your entries *cough* Yes, 99.99% of livejournal is crap. However, there are many livejournals that aren't.
• I would object further that 99.99% of LJ users are crap, but the LJ codebase is one of the more advanced blogging systems out there. In many things (comments, RSS feeds, social networking) they should be considered pioneers even. The biggest problem with LJ as a journalling system is that the developers and maintainers essentially ignore all user input. Their database back-end would benefit from some professional design, and I am sure they have users with the requisite experience who would do it pro bono for favoured user status, but they seem to have uptime issues every few months. To be fair, so does Blogger. (Weblogs aren't exactly a five-nines industry.) shawnj: ljArchive is a total hack. It crawls through a user's history by means of the navigation API! Would it kill them to allow SQL dumps, perhaps for a small fee?
• However, there are many livejournals that aren't. I was being a smartass, by the way; I have one. Though I don't exempt myself from the 99.9%.
• i love w.bloggar. I use it exclusively. I like just double clicking it and being able to blog, rather than go to a web site, type in my username and password and whatnot. w.bloggar makes it as easy as writing a letter in notepad. I think the reason why Haloscan is so used is that Blogger's comments are fairly new and have only been around for a few months and so people don't really see a reason to switch. If you want to get into editing css, I HIGHLY reccommend editCSS a Firefox extention that allows you to right click and see and edit the css of ANY web site on the fly. That way, not only can you see how sites you like did it, you can also easilly change things without breaking your site (the changes are only temporary, so you have to cut and paste the changes into your template when you get soemthing you like, but it is MUCH better than editing, saving, refreshing, seeing you screwed things up, and having to work forever to undo your mistake!)
• surprised no one has mentioned mBlog as an alternative blogging tool. Moveable Type has many tools that blogspot doesn't. Try reading Everything you wanted to know about blogging but were afraid to ask. I've used hello and flicker. I like hello the only problem is that when you upload a photo to the bloggerbog it automatically posts the picture. Hello will allow you to create a post in hello before posting it - that is is you haven't rip your code to shreads like I have done and it only supports IE (ick). The upside is that all pictures are hosted on google's servers. Down side is you may have to quickly edit a post or two. An alternative i've used is image shack. If you settle on blogspot you'll need to ping seperate blog trackers (blogspot only pings weblogs and has no option to add links). Might want to add ping-o-matic to your bookmarks list and this standalone trackback pinger. I disagree with "rethink it if it isn't orginal angle" If you want to write, write. If your in it for the traffic, the fame ... might happen if some /. finds a post interesting or some big blogger has found your blog and commented on it but don't expect it. I wouldn't get my own domain name until you've blogged for a bit and if you keep writing then get off whatever hosted service your using. Why waste the cash if you lose interest in three months? Most of all have fun!
• I have a livejournal for boring personal stuff and my Movable Type wossit for MoFi-related stuff. I like 'em both, now that I've installed MT-Blacklist over the MT blog to cut back on the comment spam. So if you go the Movable Type route, be sure to get MT-Blacklist right away.
• At the risk of sounding like a dick... 1) Please don't blog. And if you are currently blogging, please stop. Now. Blogging destroys the ozone layer, and it also makes baby jesus cry. 2) Yeah, and stop saying 'blog'. 3) If you want to keep a private journal for yourself, just use notepad. 4 Fuckity fuck fucking fuckfuck fuck fuck.
• Well, if you're really going to do it, go all out. You'll need a really catchy name....like say, Wedgeblog....Paint your new domain name on the side of your car. Stand downtown durning lunch hour handing out flyers promoting your blog. Call talk radio programs and slip in the name of your blog. Start a bowling league named after your blog. Tear down all those "Work from your home!" signs and replace them with signs promoting your blog. By following these simple time proven steps, your new Wedgeblog will certainly be a success.
• At the risk of sounding like a dick... Thank God you put that disclaimer on there.
• At least he's only a dick and not a narc.
• Further thanks for the advice and to Ms. Huber (not sure of your handle) for the gmail invite. Beeza, there's a lot of useful looking links in 'Everything you wanted to know about blogging but were afraid to ask' that I'll go through in the next few days and yeah, part of the reason is to do some writing and research type stuff, I'm not thinking 'journal', more a fanzine type approach. (I'm also going to attempt nanowrimo this year to see if I can hit a deadline - something I had problems with at uni - and help me decide whether to do an M.A.) Argh's tips plan means I'll be able to retire on advertising revenue from the wedgeblog so I'm set for life, I'm surprised you're passing on gilt edged advice like that for free rather than keeping them for yourself. ;) Wedge - does blogging kill kittens though?
• Every time you act like a dick, God kills a kitten and creates a b**g in its place. ha!
• Gentleman - its "path." And, you're welcome, or maybe thanked since I have 5 more invitations that I don't know what to do with. You'll soon know the pain of getting lots of gmail invitations which you can't send out once you've tried every contact you have - even though you know you should, or something. Even if you send yourself invitations so you can set up mulitple account, you'll still get more. IT NEVER ENDS!
• Actually, I'm with Wedge on this one. The world doesn't need another blogger. (Unless it's Charo)
• The world doesn't need another blogger Too many people talking, too. I mean, after 30,000 years of human history, hasn't everything been said that needs to be said?
• Every time you act like a dick, God kills a kitten and creates a b**g in its place. ha! No, an angel gets its wings. Didn't you see that movie?
• No, I am pretty sure 'hot beef injection' hasn't been said enough times yet. Time to start a blog.
• Every time you act like a dick, an angel gets a... hot beef injection? Gross.