Thursday, August 21, 2008

Blogs 'n me

When I first started blogging it was at livejournal four years ago. Eventually I also had one at Free-Association and quite a few other places. It certainly was a whole lot easier than my old manually editing HTML all the time! I blogged about all kinds of stuff: from a diary of my SRS trip to geek stuff to daily observations to memes.

Because I was using livejournal so much I bought a paid account. I did not really need it, but I liked the ability to post by mail and wanted to support the company. Within the past year I created two more livejournal accounts for my main two SL characters.

Then LJ went downhill. The blurring between paid and basic accounts. The usual corporation sale to someone bigger. The creation of a new account that paid for itself with advertisements.

Finally they went too far. The announcement that free accounts would show advertising unless you were logged in. Not only that, you would have no idea what was being advertised using your work if you were logged in when you looked at your page.

Bye-bye LJ.

I am stuck choosing between blogger and wordpress though. While I like the wordpress software, I do not like the support I am seeing at the wordpress.com site ("I have never heard of twitter so it must not be popular" from an employee). With blogger though I am seeing lots of things I like, including features I was paying for at livejournal (like posting via email) and ones I did not even have access too (the various connections with twitter for example). Looks like blogger won the contest to be my new blog site. I have created another blog here for one of my second life characters and will combine the other (Kara Spengler) into this blog.

Hello Blogger.

Some of the features I like here:
- third party integration, so I can hook up things for blog notifications to my twitter and archive my twitters here
- all sorts of gadgets you can use, including non-listed ones like having my recent tweets
- an extensible framework
- posting via email is free, including attaching pictures
- a thriving beta features program with a real discussion area about anything on it
- what looks to be good support in general
- integration with one of my existing logins *and* openid
- owned by a stable company so I do not need to worry about someone coming in and changing policies
- I am sure I will realize others as time goes on

Now the question: I do not want to leave livejournal with content they can use as advertising pages.  However I do not just want to throw away 4 years of writing either. Anyone have any good ideas? I have set my mail blog there to be friends-only, but that is only a temporary measure.

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