free blog |
BLOGGER AS THE MOST FLEXIBLE FREE BLOG |
Blogger is unlimited; there is no restriction on the number of blogs you can have or the number of pictures you can upload. Blogger is easy. Advertising “push-button publishing,” Blogger gets you up and posting faster than any other service. You might think that I am making a whole-hearted recommendation of Blogger.There is much to recommend it, but Blogger has drawbacks, too. Despite its user-friendliness, Blogger has the soul of a geek and sometimes makes simple tasks unnecessarily complicated. One complaint: the difficulty of adding sidebar content such as a blogroll. Blogger makes you stick your hands into your site’s code to do that, which is why so many Blogger sites don’t display blogrolls. Blogger stands somewhere between social networks and TypePad.
Blogger offers some of the community tool that are characteristic of social sites such as Yahoo! 360 and MSN Spaces. For example, each listed interest in your Blogger profile links to search resultsshowing everyone else in Blogger with that interest — one of the bedrock features of social networks. But Blogger lives up to its name and is a more blog-intensive, blog-centric service than the social networks. Blogger is primarily about blogging, not primarily about meeting people.
If you haven’t yet chosen a blogging service and are drawn to Blogger by its friendly reputation and no-charge service, you might want to read through this chapter to make sure it’s the right choice for you.
The Blogger Look Because Blogger offers relatively few (but fairly attractive) templates, many blogs are instantly recognizable as belonging to Blogger. One example is “Blogging For Dummies” — hey, wait a minute! That’s not my blog. It belongs to Jeff Sievers, who started the blog as a how-to about blogging. It has more recently evolved into a general diary about everything from politics to the repeated breakdowns of onion's car. The lack of a visible feed is another drawback to Blogger. However, Blogger uses a common feed link that you can simply add to the end of any blog’s home-page URL: /atom.xml
Blogger uses an alternative to the RSS feed format called Atom. Atom feeds work just like RSS feeds in the important ways. Atom feeds display blog entries just like RSS feeds in a feed newsreader. Blogger’s choice of Atom has
nothing to do with the lack of a feed link on Blogger blogs. The missing feed link is simply a design choice at Blogger — inexplicable, perhaps, but there it is. If you use a feed-enabled Web browser (such as Firefox), Blogger feeds
appear in the browser just as reliably as on pages that do contain feed links. Firefox finds the feed link in the page’s code, where it lurks invisibly.
You must start an account with Blogger to begin blogging, but your account is completely free. Furthermore, one account gives you a theoretically unlimited number of blogs. Each blog has a theoretically unlimited amount of space for
entries and photos. I say “theoretically” because I have heard of restrictions being placed on accounts that are overused. No published restrictions exist, and with normal use even active bloggers should be able to expand their sites
without constraint.
Starting up is easy. This section walks you through the path of least resistance: the easiest way to start posting entries in Blogger. You can make changes to your account, and to your blog, later. In later chapters (covering
TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress, and Radio UserLand), I recommend doing some blog setup before starting to write. With Blogger, which is designed as “pushbutton publishing,” I advise pushing those buttons and
getting your blog published without delay (except for a few small settings).Then, later in this chapter, I describe how you can customize, personalize, and otherwise exercise other blog settings.