Three Blogging Sites Reviewed
| Published 9/17/04
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Publishing web journals, web logs or "blogs" has become a growing internet fad. When you're ready to put your life out on the internet, it can be tempting to jump right in to whatever service you can find and start publishing. This is a mistake though. Wouldn't it be depressing to have set up your blog, told all your friends about it, and then two weeks later run across a hosting site that you like better than the one you have?
Trust me, it's more irritating than you would think. To save you from making a "fools-rush-in" blog mistake, this article will review three top blog-hosting sites, and score them on a 4-star system. Each feature gets a possible 0 - 4 stars. Get ready to join one of the fastest growing trends on the internet? Let's go. Like signing up for any website's account, blog hosts ask for a username and an email address. From there they vary. Live Journal: without a doubt the fastest and easiest. Rating:  Blogger: The Blogger signup process is longer, but takes care of more details that Live Journal makes you do later. Rating: Diaryland: The signup form is extremely ugly, and the site makes up a password for you that you have to change later. Not so great. Rating: The features of each the site offers are big selling points and something important to consider before you sign up. All three sites offer something different and cater to different needs and levels of experience. Live Journal: LJ offers a friends list (a list of other members you mark as friends that tells you when they've updated), comment posting (so that people can leave feedback about your posts), communities and groups (so you can network with people who have similar interests) but does not offer customizable HTML (so you cannot totally alter the look of your site). They do, however, offer several customizable templates that are almost just as good. The multitude of pre-made templates is a plus for a potential member who doesn't know much about HTML editing. Rating: Blogger: Blogger does not offer a friends list or interest-based communities that you can join. It does, however, allow you to use your own custom design, if you choose, and allows everyone to post comments. Rating: Diaryland: Diaryland offers a friends list, groups you can join (or create) and customizable HTML, but no way for non-members of the site to post comments. To leave a "note," you must be a member. Rating: Of course, the whole reason we're here is to put our life stories on the internet. The easier your blog site allows you to publish your thoughts, the happier you will be. Live Journal: LJ offers a downloadable client that you can install on your computer to update your journal, instead of using the online form. The online form is quite versatile though, it offers spellchecking, a "rich text" format that works like a miniature word processor, and a feature called "lj cut" that allows you to skip a part of your entry (like pictures) and put in a link instead for faster loading (or whatever reason you may have for hiding it). Rating: Blogger: Like Live Journal, Blogger offers a rich text format for editing posts, but the Blogger form is much more versatile. It allows you to change the font and color of your text, plus several other features that LJ doesn't offer. Rating: Diaryland: Diarlyland only offers a simple online form with no special features to update with. This form has also been known to time out and destroy whatever the user had been typing, so it is a good idea to type up entries in a word processor and then paste them in. Not so great, either. Rating: While writing this article, I signed up for an account with each site, in order to give them each a fair run. You can see them for yourself: Live Journal Blogger Diaryland |
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