Moving to another Blog – clear.bluedei.com!!!

Just a reminder that I’m now only posting new posts on my blog: Clear Blue Dei.  Please come visit me there!

~Susan Mellott

WordPress.com isn’t working for me (see why) so I’m moving to Clear.bluedei.com!

Hi! During the course of testing many different blog engines, I ended up with 3 different ones that all had the same posts. Now I am trying to consolidate so I am moving to new blog at Clear.bluedei.com. I just finished a 3-part series on which blog engine I liked the best. You can see the third and final post at my Clear Bluedei blog, (along with some new, fun posts). Clear Blue Dei has all the posts on this blog and will have all new posts from now on.

The results were that I liked Google Blogger best for ease of use, functionality and for when you don’t have your own web host that you can install your blog on. And if you have your own web host and are technically inclined and enjoy playing around with ftp and html and unix and all, I like wordpress.org using your own self-hosted blog for the greatest functionality and control.

So I have set up my own wordpress.org blog on my domain clear.bluedei.com and I plan to consolidate my blogs into one and it will be that one. Both other blogs (this one and alongthepathto20.blogspot.com) will still be there along with all the posts to date, but only clear.bluedei.com will contain new posts. Actually, I will most likely set up another blog so I can separate my personal and/or fun posts from my Web 2.0 posts since it makes more sense to separate them.

I’d love to use this blog for my personal blog but since it is called allthingsweb20, it doesn’t work well for a personal blog. And unfortunately, wordpress.com charges $10 / year (I think that is the charge, it was hard to figure out and they call it 10 ‘credits’ a year) to redirect a blog to your own domain. Which would seriously pain me to pay since most all other blog engines allow you to redirect for free. And the only reason to use this blog would be because there are old links pointing to the posts and it has a higher technorati rating. But WordPress.com doesn’t make it easy to understand all the nuances of redirecting. Here is a description from their blog. Ok, now do you understand? I don’t and I had no trouble whatsoever redirecting my Google Blogger blog.

Actually, I don’t care for the whole pricing structure at wordpress.com period. Here are some of the other charges for ‘extras’:

Custom CSS – 15 credits per year ($0.04/day)

Unlimited Private Users – 30 credits per year ($0.08/day)

1 GB space upgrade (add to upload directory) 20 credits per year ($0.05/day)

5 GB space upgrade (add to upload directory) 50 credits per year ($0.14/day)

10 GB space upgrade (add to upload directory) 90 credits per year ($0.25/day)

(not to mention their VIP Hosting Service that costs $600 to setup and $300/month hosting fee)

So please go to my clear.bluedei.com blog for my new posts. I will keep this blog with all the posts thus far, but from now on will be posting only on my main blog unless I find some way to use this one again and/or set up a new personal blog.

Thank you for visiting and please come check out my All Things Web 2.0 blog at clear.bluedei.com.

~Susan Mellott

Derren Brown – Master of Mind Control

Have you heard of Derren Brown? He is an English Psychological Illusionist and skeptic of Paranormal Phenomenon. He has had a TV show on Channel 4 (British Public Service Television) since 2000. On July 26, 2007, the US based Sci Fi Channel began showing six one hour episodes of a series titled Mind Control with Derren Brown.

I had heard of him before from a discussion regarding NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) on an international Aikido list I belong to.

An important assumption of NLP is that emotion, thought and behavior consists of, and is influenced by, how the sensory-specific modalities (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, gustatory) are organized and give rise to consciousness.^[1] Further, the mode and limits to the underlying mental representations is revealed by unconscious choice of words, sensory-specific predicates (eg. visual language) and non-verbal cues (such as intonation; gesture; posture; facial expression and eye movements).

In the course of this discussion, Derren Brown came up, along with a link to YouTube video of his called Derren Brown NLP. Here is that video:

This video just blew me away. I started looking into NLP (although not as much as I want to, it is on my “to-do” list). But especially, I started looking for more Derren Brown information and videos. My first place to look was the wikipedia entry for Derren Brown. And of course, I also looked on YouTube and found a very large number of clips from his TV show and specials.

Go browse those YouTube videos. I guarantee you will be astonished and amazed. And what is particularly interesting is that he frequently goes back and re-shows the clip, explaining what he did. And sometimes you wonder how you could have missed it and every time, you wonder how he did it.

A couple of nights ago, the SciFi channel broadcast of Mind Control was on and my husband got to see it. There was a chess challenge between him and 9 extremely good chess players (champions to Grand Masters). His challenge was to win against the group challenge, playing each player individually. And he did. And then he explained it and it was an amazing “outside the 9 dots” solution which made perfect sense (although I’d challenge anyone else to be able to do it). Of course, he didn’t explain the number he had written beforehand. But I’m sure it would be logical. Here is the YouTube video of this.

Here is a list of great books on NLP on Amazon that also reference Derren Brown. I have several saved off in a wish list that someday I hope to read.

(I’m going through a transition now from buying books to getting books from the library and it is taking a little adjustment. It is so easy to find and save books in Amazon (or any online seller) and then just order them. But I retired and am more careful with my money now!)

Anyway, at least take a look at the YouTube videos. It will amaze, amuse and astound you.

~Susan Mellott

Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars Part 3: The Others

This is the final post in this series. In Part One I created blogs in each of the various blog engines. Part Two then reviewed the 3 major blog engines, Google Blogger, WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

I’ve decided to make my primary blog my own hosted WordPress from WordPress.org on my own domain Clear.Bluedei.com. You will notice however, that it is not as full-featured yet and my WordPress.com blog Allthingsweb20.wordpress.com or my Google Blogger blog, alongthepathto20.blogspot.com. That is because when you host your own WordPress blog, you have to set up everything yourself, it comes very vanilla. This allows you add all kinds of plugins and really customize it, but it takes time and is not as quick to get up and running with all the bells and whistles. Blogger really shines at being quick to get up and running with lots of add-ons that are easy to setup. Even WordPress.com, while limited in what it can do compared to the others, will let you create a very nice and full-featured blog quickly. But for me, the ability to host and completely control my own blog and to customize it however I want, makes it worth the extra time it takes to get it looking as good and as full-featured as the others.

(NOTE: We went with Inmotion Hosting for our web host and you can read my post about choosing this host service here. In retrospect, I would have chosen Blue Host instead. I did not find them until too late. I may still switch although it will cost me and will be a hassle to lose everything. But twice so far I have lost some or all of a post I was was trying to create because I could not temporarily connect to my site (or to inmotionhosting.com either). Just now this happened again. It doesn’t go down for long, say 5-10 minutes. But I also haven’t done a blog post for at least a week and it happened just as I was trying to write this post so I really don’t know the extent of the problem. But I have concerns with its reliability when I am trying to write a post and I work hard enough to write my posts, I don’t need to be afraid of losing them and/or having to wait and worry about it until my site comes back.)

In this post, I will review the other, less well-known blog engines. While I recommend using either Google Blogger or WordPress, I think it is useful to have an idea about each of these others. You can see an example of each in Part One of this series.

One of the other players in the blog engine wars is Six Apart. They have a number of different blog engines available: Vox, LiveJournal, TypePad and MovableType. These are listed in order from their lowest to highest end blogs. I looked only at the 2 free blogs which were Vox and LiveJournal.

Both TypePad and MovableType have monthly charges and although they say they have a 14 day free trial you have to actually choose a plan as if you were signing up for it and give your credit card information and then cancel it within the 14 days. I wasn’t about to do that so I will just give you an idea of what they have and you can go to the sixapart site if you want to know more. Personally, I would never pay the prices they are asking for a blog engine with so many good, free ones available. As an example, Typepad, which they call The choice for professional bloggers, costs anywhere between $.95 and $89.95 per month (4.95, 8.95, 14.95, 29.95, 89.95 / mo with 15% off annual subscription). The lowest cost blog has no domain mapping, full html , custom css. This is less than you would get with Google Blogger for free. I did not even look at MovableType which they call the The best choice for business blogging.

So that left me with Vox (Personal blogging taken to the next level) and LiveJournal (A diverse community of independent bloggers). Here are my impressions of these. Again, you can see my working blogs by following the links in my Part One post.

Vox:

• can import posts from other blogs (but only 1 month it appears)
• looks childish
• has neighborhoods and groups
• can easily add video and book lists
• can add widgets
• can add friends
• Seems more like a mix of MySpace and a blog

LiveJournal:

• has ads for plus free version
• can add friends
• no import of posts?
• wants to use photobucket for pics
• slow processing
• can set ‘mood’ of post
• very MySpace-ish
• WAY too many advertisements and you can’t control them

My view of SixApart blog engines are that they are just trying to make money from them and I would not be interested in their blogs, although I do know a few people who use LiveJournal and TypePad.

InstantSpot is a blog engine that almost didn’t make it into my testing because I had not heard of it and only found out about it right at the end. But I was impressed enough by it that I wanted to include it. Here is my instant spot blog. I didn’t do much to it but from looking around at other instant spot blogs, they look to be highly customizable, almost to the point of looking like a CMS (content management system). And it clearly seems to be geared toward tracking, marketing and promoting your site.

Instant Spot:

• can edit .css
• allows google adsense (just click in ad manager)
• tracking script manager works with trackers like g analy, feedburner, etc
• host header mgmt allows redirecting to a host domain name
• definitely looks geared towards tracking, marketing and promoting
• has large set of social networking icons (like digg, etc) at bottom of each post (many of which I have never heard)
• tag line is “Get spotted now!
• seems to be highly customizable judging by looking at other instant spot blogs. Not sure how though.
• has ads on page

Instant Spot was the only other blog engine that looked intriguing to me. I could see it being useful for people who are selling or promoting something and who want a very nice looking site (not sure of the effort involved though) and who want to be able to market, track and promote their site. If you had a club or small business, this seems like a good site. We teach Aikido and I could see easily setting up a website for our Aikido club on this. Here is an instant spot site that is for a fitness class that is not fancy and was probably easy to set up, but is a decent site for their classes. (I don’t know or endorse these people, just thought it was a good example of a not-too-fancy, easy to set up, useful site). And here is a really nice looking blog. Instant Spot seems to have some definite possibilities.

Well, that is it for my review of blog engines. Google Blogger for balance between being easy and having functionality, WordPress.org (self-hosted wordpress) for total control and flexibility and Instant Spot for an easy (I think) website for a club, class, non-profit or small business.

~Susan Mellott

Las Vegas: The Addiction (not Gambling, Internet / Blogging)

In my last post I lamented the near lack of free internet in Las Vegas and how I couldn’t see paying for it. I was planning on schlepping my laptop to the few free hotspots, just to check my email a time or two.

My husband said I should just bite the bullet and pay for it since I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t. And he was ever, ever so right. I don’t know what made me think that I could not buy it when I have my laptop with me and have wireless right there waiting for me, all I had to do was put my credit card number in and I was surfing. In some weird way, it was infinitely worth paying the $10/day to be able to get on and check my email, check my blogs, look things up and write posts whenever I wanted.

We are quite happy to play penny slots for all our little gambling (and free drinks) breaks, but I’ll put $10 a day in just to be able to be connected. And I think, how much do I really use it? Couldn’t I just do a couple of hauls to a hotspot and be done? And of course, I could do that if I was broke. But I’ve got $10 in my pocket and its going to buy me access.
And although for probably no good reason since I doubt that many people read my blog, I still feel a need? desire? responsibility? fear of losing people? to make sure I post regularly. Sean and I were discussing this in the elevator, about the whole blogging experience and the mindset of a blogger. About how for the blogger, the act of blogging seems to be a really creative outlet and a way to clarify one’s thoughts. And the surprise of having people actually read and get something out of something you have posted is both gratifying and a real impetus to keep blogging. But the downside is that it is easy to start feeling a pressure to please people instead of just doing it and letting whoever may be interested read it and not worrying about it.

It is also somewhat addictive to have a lot of people read what you wrote. I blogged about the Skype outage last week, just because I use Skype and had wondered why I couldn’t connect and then found out it had crashed. And suddenly I had a ridiculous (for me) number of hits on my post. I posted it at 4:30pm and by 4:34 I had like 600 people read (or at least view) it. I thought I was getting spammed or attacked or something.

But it was just that everyone was trying to find out what was going on. So I wrote another post the next day with more information and it was really being read. And then another. And at some point, I realized that I had quit blogging about it just because I had something to say about it and started blogging it because it was a hot topic and people would read what I wrote. I knew if I wrote something even remotely interesting or intelligent about Skype right then, people would read it.

While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with writing about what people are interested in, when I find myself writing just for other people’s interest when I’ve pretty much lost interest in it myself and even worse, just to increase my hit count, I have to re-examine what I am doing and why.

I have always been a writer and have been on many lists and boards where people read and responded to what I wrote. But this is something beyond that. This is a medium that has people coming to my blog to read what I have to say. And a surprising (to me) number of them. And they even come back to see what else I have written.

I’ve never had a group of people who wanted to read what I had to say and I have to say that I really get a great deal of satisfaction and gratification from it. But it can also be addictive. I want to enjoy that people read what I write, but I don’t want to need it. I don’t want to obsess about it.

And I think it is wise for people to be aware of some of these pitfalls and potential dangers that are inherent in many of the Web 2.0 tools. They are wonderful, creative outlets and can enhance one’s life immensely. But I think everyone needs to make sure they are monitoring their involvement and motivation.

It is a truly fascinating time for people with all the amazing ability there is to create and interact. But just like me, I’m sure there are others who may need to step back periodically and look at it and make sure they are in control and are not being manipulated (most likely, by themselves).  And really, who shouldn’t do that regularly about most everything anyway?

Thank you for reading 🙂

~Susan Mellott

Las Vegas 1.0 – Can’t Find Free Wireless Access on the Strip?

I am getting ready to leave for Las Vegas on Monday and I realized that the hotel where we are staying does not have free wireless access.  In fact, it is rather expensive, especially since I am used to being able to go almost anywhere and get free wireless access.  Fort Wayne is an amazingly progressive town and has had many free wireless access points for a very long time, as a matter of fact, it was nationally recognized as one of America’s most “wired and inspired” cities (according to Mayor Graham Richards) and has many, many wi-fi hot-spots.  Some of the more interesting hotspot areas include:

• Headwaters Park
• Freimann Square
• Lawton Park
• Several downtown restaurants
• Allen County Courthouse courtyard
• The main Allen County Public Library and all 13 branches
• The Fort Wayne International Airport
• and of course all the other common ones like MacDonalds, House of Pancakes, coffee houses, bars, restaurants, hotels, etc.

So I just assumed that I would have no problem finding a free wireless hotspot in Las Vegas (specifically, the strip).  Buzzzz.  Wrong.  As near as I can tell, there are maybe 5 free hotspots on the strip and the strip is a couple miles long.  The closest to where we will be staying is the Apple Store in the Fashion Show Mall which is across the street and down a “Las Vegas Block” from us.   If you’ve been to Las Vegas, you know what a Las Vegas block is.  It is about a half a mile.

There is also one at the Las Vegas Hilton (and in the Las Vegas Hilton Monorail station – why couldn’t they have put it in some other monorail station?).  Again, if you know Las Vegas, you know that *nothing* is close to the Las Vegas Hilton.  So I could pay $5 each way to ride the monorail there, but that would be $20 for the two of us, just to get wireless access (although I do enjoy Star Trek – The Experience).  There is supposed to be one at the Planet Hollywood/Aladdin hotel, which is a little farther than the Fashion Show Mall, but in the other direction.  And someone thinks there is one by the hallway between Luxor and Excalibur which is at the far end of the strip.  Oh yes, there should be one at the Wynn too which the same distance as the Fashion Show Mall, but on our side of the road.  The Wynn is new since I was last at Vegas and I forget about it.  But that really is about it!  And in a town that is wall to wall hotels, casinos, restaurants and bars, I find that unbelievable.

And I really don’t want to be lugging my laptop all over creation in 100+ temps, just to get to the internet.  I don’t want to, but I will.  I can’t imagine going for 4 days without logging in.

But I plan to make it as little as possible, which means I won’t be posting much, if any, in the next week.  And I have things I want to post!  And I wanted to post about our trip.

I love Las Vegas, but it needs to get its 2.0 on.

~Susan Mellott

Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars Part 2: The Results

So as you know from my first post on this “Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars Part 1: The Test“, I am reviewing and evaluating several different blog engines, with an emphasis on Google Blogger and WordPress (.com and .org). You can see my previous post to see the different blogs in action. And I’m sure this is going to be a large post, just reviewing the Blogger and WordPress blogs, so I will have a “Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars: The Other Options” post following this one where I’ll talk about the other blogs I looked at. But for all intents and purposes, it came down to Blogger and WordPress (2 ways).

I wanted to decide which type of blog would work best for my needs and which one I would recommend to others. It turned out to not be quite that simple. Each of the 3 main blog engines (Blogger, wordpress.com hosted WordPress and self-hosted WordPress) had some serious advantages and some serious drawbacks. So as it turns out, rather than recommending one above all others, I will give an overview of each, what is good and bad about them and why and for whom I would recommend each particular one.

And to make a long story short, I recommend Blogger for people who want someone else to host their blog, don’t want to pay for a web hosting service and/or who want a quick and easy blog that takes hardly any maintenance or technical know-how.

For people who want the all-around best solution, who have their own web host and like to get ‘techie’ (and know how to do installs, use unix and ftp, etc), it’s definitely WordPress from wordpress.org. This is the most flexible, you have the most control over it and your data and it will do almost anything you want if you find the right plug-ins or code. But you have to have the know-how and desire to use it and it is only as good as you make it. And you have to have somewhere to install it like a web hosting service.

Google Blogger: I personally give Google Blogger the edge over WordPress.com hosted WordPress for anyone who doesn’t have their own web host and/or wants an easy and quick blog. I think it is good for:

1. Anyone who doesn’t have a lot of programming, moving files, installs, bits and bolts of how things work experience
2. Anyone who wants an easy setup with the most features for a blog hosted by the blog provider and the most options for adding plugins and html code easily.
3. Anyone who wants to have their own domain name, but use a blog hosted by the blog provider. In other words, who wants to buy a domain name like say, http://www.allaboutme.com (costs about $10/yr) but doesn’t want to have their own web hosting service where they can put and maintain their own data and blogs (costs about $10/month). Redirecting is free in Blogger, it costs $10? (10 credits) in WordPress.com
4. You might want to have commercial usage on your blog. WordPress.com’s term of service prohibits ‘commercial usage’ (although its unclear to mean exactly what they mean). It appears OK on a Google Blog (see this post from the Blogger Help group).

Google Blogger has the most features, the most choices and the ability to add html code easily including that using javascript. That means that when you find something you like (like say Odiogo, which is the text-to-speech widget you see at the top of my posts on my google and personally hosted wordpress blog), you can add it to your blog posts very easily. You cannot add Odiogo to a WordPress.com hosted blog because it doesn’t allow javascript. I’ve run into several widgets that I wanted to add to my blogs, but could not easily do it in WordPress.com. You can easily redirect it to your own domain name so when they type either your original blog name or your domain name, both will go to your blogger blog. It is an easy, attractive and flexible blog engine. It doesn’t have as nice a built-in statistics page as wordpress, but you can use Google Analytics (which is nice, but isn’t real time) or any other stats tools like ActiveMeter or Sitemeter or ShinyStat (or I’m sure there are others) to keep track of it.

The one thing that seems to keep a lot of people from recommending Google Blogger is that it does not allow you to back up your posts. Therefore, if anything happened to Blogger, you could lose your data. Also, you can’t move the data to another google blog if you wanted to. And looking at the hacks to backup your data, there really isn’t a good way to do it. Except…

What you can do is to create a WordPress.com blog and import your blogger data into your wordpress blog. It is very easy in WordPress.com to import posts and comments from other blog engines, basically just point and click. Then you can export the data from your wordpress blog into a file of your own. You can’t reload that file back into Google Blogger, but you have all your data and can recreate it in wordpress easily. Which is better than losing it all. And if you use a redirect to your own domain name in Blogger, if something happened, you could change the redirect to point to your WordPress blog (for $10/credits per year, I believe). It’s a work-around, but I tried it and it works just fine.

There is some concern about losing your rank if you move (which I don’t totally understand about rank and all yet) but here is a post that explains things you can do to help with that, called “Moving from Blogger to WordPress without Losing Traffic and Page Rank” (Actually, when I qit blogging on all my blogs and switch to one (clear.bluedei.com), I may have to figure out what all this means.) Also, as I understand, Blogger (as would be expected) integrates very well with Google Adsense, which I gather is a way to make money from your website, with advertising, I guess.

Also, if you start with Blogger, you can choose later to go to WordPress. You can’t go the other way because Blogger doesn’t have an import or export function. For the life of me, I don’t know why.

WordPress on wordpress.com: This is the most middle-of-the-road bet. It doesn’t really do anything as well as any of the others (except for import/export) but it doesn’t have anything really wrong with it either. Many people would recommend it over Blogger. But it seems that it is mostly because Blogger doesn’t provide a way to back it up and my work-around takes care of that, in my opinion. One thing that I really like about wordpress.com is that they provide an easy to use stats page that tells you how many page views you’ve had each day, which pages were viewed, how people got to your site and what they clicked while there. The one thing it doesn’t tell you is who actually viewed your site. You have to use another stats package like sitemeter or ActiveStats to see that. And Google Analytics will not give you as much information using wordpress.com as it would if you were using Blogger because it requires some code to be added that you cannot add to WordPress.com blogs.

This appeals to all the people that Blogger and would be a better choice if:

1. You really want to be able to export your data and import it back into WordPress easily, or want to be able to import posts/comments from other blog engines.
2. You plan to go to a WordPress blog that you host yourself and you just want to get started now with WordPress.com and then import your posts and comments into your own hosted WordPress blog.
3. AND you don’t plan to have to have commercial usage on your blog. wordpress.com’s term of service prohibits ‘commercial usage’ and you are supposed to use wordpress.org (your own hosted site) if you do…
4. UNLESS you are a big business and want wordpress to host your blog using their VIP Hosting Service that costs $600 to setup and $300/month hosting fee. If you have that kind of money, you can decide if that is worth it. Briefly looking at it, I would think not. For that kind of money, you have many, many options. But if you have that kind of money for a blog, I doubt that you are reading my post 🙂

As I said before, WordPress.com has some drawbacks. It is not as flexible as Blogger. There are things you want to add that you can’t (but you can in Blogger). You can’t use javascript and you cannot have any commercial usage or you run the risk of being shut down. You also have to pay to redirect your blog to your own domain name (this is something you very well may want to do at some point) and for many other things too, like more upload storage space or the ability to customize your css or unlimited users.

Self-hosted WordPress from wordpress.org: This is, in my opinion, the very best option for:

1. anyone who is ‘techie’ (understands files, uploading, ftp, unix, etc) and
2. who likes dealing with the bits and bolts, likes installing, maintaining and customizing their own blog and templates and all and
3. who has a host server to put their install on.
4. who wants to be able to do pretty much anything they want to their blog, wants to add all sorts of plug-ins and who wants to really ‘pimp their ride’.

Self-host WordPress offers the most options and is the most flexible of any of the choices. Really, it is about the only option I’ve found for being able to have total control of your own blog, outside a CMS (content management system) like Drupal, which is extremely more powerful than just a blog engine and requires a lot more knowledge and programming know-how.

Some drawbacks of it are that you have to have a host to install it on (either your own, or from a web service that costs about $10/month) and you have to install and maintain and customize it yourself so you have to have some experience with these things and you have to want to do it or it will just be a hassle and frustrating. And your blog will only be as good and functional as you make it. It comes as basically vanilla and you have to add everything to it.
You also have to be sure your host is stable and has good backups in case something happens. The other blog engines are as stable and well-backed up as google.com and wordpress.com can make them so it doesn’t vary so much. But your own host system can be very good or very bad, depending on who you are going with.

Also, I tried exporting from my wordpress.org blog to import into my wordpress.com blog (as if I had a problem with my web host and had to move) and it didn’t move my extra pages (like about me and books I am reading). Nor of course, any of my plug-ins or customization. So it is important to save your plug-ins and files. Since they are just files on a server, you can back-up any or all of it any time you want.

Here is an article that talks about the differences between Google Blogger and self-hosted WordPress from wordpress.org that has some good information. It is part one, but for the life of me, I can’t find part two. It still has good info.

So to me, it comes down to Google Blogger for flexibility and ease of use vs. self-hosted wordpress for control and customization. And that is a choice that depends on what you are looking for and how much you want to do.

I will post my reviews of the other, less well-known blog engines in my next post on this subject.

-Susan Mellott

Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars: Part 1 – The Test

I have recently gotten into blogging and in the process, wanted to determine which blog engine I felt was best. So I created a working blog in the following engines:

• Google Blogger: AlongthePathto20.blogspot.com
• Google Blogger, redirected to my domain: BlueDei.Blogspot.com redirected to blog.bluedei.com (either of these addresses go to the same place, my google blog)
• WordPress.com (hosted on WordPress): AllThingsWeb20.wordpress.com
• WordPress.org (installed on my subdomain): clear.bluedei.com
• WordPress.com (used to test backing up a blog, this is the vanilla wordpress.com blog with just an import of my posts from my Google blog, AlongthePathto20): clearbluedei.wordpress.com
• Vox blog: smmellott.vox.com
• LiveJournal blog: smmellott.livejournal.com
• TypePad and MovableType: didn’t create because they charge for them and I would have made a “free trial” blog but it wanted me to select a plan and put in my charge card info and I gather the free trial meant I could cancel it for free. So of course, I didn’t do anything with either of these.
• UPDATE: just added Instant Spot: clearbluedei.instantspot.com (this is just another blog engine I found)

You can go take a look at each of these to see how they look.

I have been actively customizing, testing and using the Google blogger blog: Alongthepathto20 and the WordPress.com blog: allthingsweb20 and the wordpress.org blog: clear.bluedei.com.

These 3 were my primary test cases and I have been copying any post I write to each of them. I have also been trying out their different features and seeing what they can and can’t do. So they are all highly customized.

The others I created for testing some particular feature (like redirecting a google blog to a domain name or testing the import feature of wordpress.com) or for trying some of the other, less popular blogs just to compare and see if they had something worth looking at. The vox and livejournal blogs I did very little customizing to. I mostly just set a template and posted a post and poked around.

I also found this one called InstantSpot after my testing. I know nothing about it but may set up a blog on it to test it. Then I’ll update this list with my Instant Spot blog.

I did not test ExpressionEngine, (someone commented they use this but I didn’t look at it, might be a Content Management System) TextPattern,(actually Content Management System) Joomla, (also Content Management System) Windows Live Spaces, or B2Evolution. Nor did I test Drupal, which is considerably more than a blog and worth a whole evaluation of its own (with the other similar tools, like Joomla) Those are actually Content Management Systems so are outside the scope of this test.

So now you have what I used for my testing. Go look at each of these to get a feel for what each is basically like. And stay tuned for “Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars: Part 2 – The Results”

~Susan Mellott

test

testing because I can’t get to my blog…

Doing the JibJab Dance

Star in Your Own JibJab! It’s Free!
Is this cool or what? It’s a bit of a waste of time, but a lot of fun. It will be better when they add more movies and things. And unfortunately I can’t seem to add the video I created to WordPress. You can see it here at my Google Blogger blog.

Also, this link should take you to our video on JibJab. BTW, you can create a post/link directly from JibJab to Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Typepad and several other Web 2.0 tools. But it doesn’t seem to just generate html to add it elsewhere.

Thanks to Libraryman, from whom I shamelessly stole, even down to starring in the same movie. What can I say, it was the best one 🙂

~Susan Mellott