Wishes for my fellow webloggers:
- Trackback (sometimes called FollowUp) for everyone, so we can trace the conversation path when it leaves a MovableType blog.
- Comments for everyone.
- RSS feeds for everyone, so I can keep up with Newz Crawler. Since I started using it, my blog reading time has plummeted, but the quality of my reading has soared.
- Automatic pinging of weblogs.com so I can tell from my blogroll when you update..
I wish these most of all for my fellow god-bloggers. Most of you are fairly new to the blogosphere. (I say this as a seventh-month-old blogger, which reminds me how new I still am at this.)
There seems to be an ongoing trend of new bloggers starting up with Blogger.com then moving over to some host-it-yourself solution (usually the free blog engine MovableType). Setting up MT can be a bit of a hassle if you don’t usually dig around in things like “path to perl,” but there is a for-pay set up option. That means the only thing left for you to do is get your own domain name and import those old Blogger.com posts.
If that still sounds too daunting, TypePad–from the makers of MT–looks like it’s about ready to launch. It’s supposed to have everything MT has and then some, and they host it for you. The pricing isn’t set yet, but it’s supposed to be in the Blogger.com range. Why switch? Trackback, comments, and automatic RSS feeds. It looks to be Blogger for people who’ve decided they’re serious about their blogging.
Of couse, there’s always Radio too. I tried it for a week or two when I was first thinking about starting to blog. It works fine, and the set up was easier than MT. But the comments are ugly and hard to link to, there’s no Trackback functionality, and you get (at Salon.com, anyhow) a random numeric web address. Radio users seem to be happy with it, though. I just wish they had Trackback.
If I could figure out how to move off Geocities Pro (which won’t accept CGI or Perl — can you tell how technologically backward I am?) or make heads or tails of all the jargon involved in setting up Moveable Type, I would. But I think I’m stuck on Blogger for the time being.
There may be ways for me to generate RSS even using my Blogger setup, though. Blogstreet does an inelegant job of it, but that may be because I’m didn’t know enough to use some of the codes it looks for. I’m keeping my eyes open for options.
How are you using Newz Crawler to keep up with God-bloggers? I’ve read the marketing info on their home page, and it looks great for keeping up with the news, but what about the rest of us?
Actually I don’t use it for news at all–it ends up being too much clutter. For blogs, I browse to the ones I want to keep up with. If they have an RSS feed (all MT and Radio blogs do), Newz Crawler picks it up and asks if I want to keep up with it.
Now, instead of checking my blogroll several times a day to see who has updated, I can check in once or twice a day. I can quickly cycle through the new posts in just a few minutes.
Is that with the free trial version or did you buy it?
Wishes Granted
Chutney at makingchutney.com has some wishes for fellow bloggers. They seem pretty reasonable to me, and, (with some poking around,) I’ve got the trackback feature to work on Facilitating Paradox. I think all the other items are built-in to Movable…
With both. The purchased version just removes a step in the process (I think).
Blogger folks can add an RSS feed at BlogMatrix.