I like blogging, in fact, I love it. It allows me to pontificate when the urge hits, and save my poor, loving wife the earaches of listening to me rant. Because of that, she loves it too. However, she thinks I spend too much time doing it (she lumps reading the news in with blogging).
But I am dissatisfied. I use blogger. I like blogger. But I do not LOVE blogger. I am tired of my template, and desperately wish I could organize my posts into categories, not to mention blogger is blocked in some parts of Vietnam (more on that later). So what am I to do??
The other day I started a mirror blog at wordpress.com. In fact, you can go to my mirror blog here. It has not been updated since I imported my posts from blogger. I like the purity of template designs offered by wordpress. I love it's search function and categories. I almost switched. However, I didn't. Wordpress doesn't allow me to edit my template.
I know HTML and I want my freedom!!!!
So, if you are unlearned in the realm of programming, I say, go ahead, use wordpress. I find it's dashboard interface incredibly easy to use and the categories are great. However, if you know what you're doing, you face a dillemma....
To spend or not to spend...that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind's eye to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune of not editing your template....
...or do you upgrade?? If you download the actual wordpress program, you can have POWER, at a cost. You have to pay someone to host your blog.
So I went to typepad.com, and found a similar conundrum. The dashboard interface looks very logical and easy to use. It also allows you some degree of playing with overall layouts. You can have calendars, and pictures, and recent comments in your side bars. All nice. But, (there's always a but) you must pay $5 a month for the basic service, and that still doesn't allow full html editing. I WANT CONTROL OVER MY DOMAIN!! Is that too much to ask? Full control is $15/mo, and I am a poor college student, counting pennies and food stamps so I can make it through medical school. Sorry, no can do.
Where to turn next?? MSN Spaces?? Whatever. I've read those blogs, and if I wanted nothing more than a string of thoughts, I'd be fine where I'm at anyway.
Which brings me back to blogger....Maybe I'll just have to be happy with what I have. It's free anyway.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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2 comments:
hey!
i just happened upon your site while i've been looking for new templates for blogger that are free... and i'm discovering there are lots out there. people freely making them for you. some better than others. so i'm still searching. i agree, i want categories in my blogger account, but i don't want to switch. so much work... and i do like blogger how i can edit stuff on my own. though i don't know html well, i have learned a few things, enough to know how to copy and paste codes etc to make drop down menus on the side etc to clean up my site. but that's a work in progress.
let me know if you find any FREE blogging service. so far, blogger's the best. i hate xanga, live journal, myspace and msn space in terms of design.
alison
Alison,
I did find ONE site--i wrote about it here. It's www.blogsome.com.
I don't know how they can use wordpress' designs, but they do, and they allow you to edit code in a similar method to blogger, but they don't allow you to import old posts from another blog!! If they did that, I think I would have jumped ship...I don't like the idea of starting all the way over.
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