Marmalade’s New Blogs
MarmaladeI’ve continued to have blogging sites on my mind, but my focus has been renewed. I thought that getting a new blog started would be a good new year’s resolution. Actually, I’ve had a number of blogs started for a long while. I just haven’t done anything with them.
I’ve been playing around with these blogs. I wanted to experiment with their options. All have similar functions for my purposes.
WordPress has pages that can be altered which the others don’t, but Blogger has categories that can be used in a similar way as pages. The concensus is that WordPress is the best option if you are willing to pay for self-hosting and put a lot of effort into developing it. As for hosted sites, Blogger seems to be better than WordPress… for most non-professional bloggers. I’m not interested in self-hosting, but still the hosted WordPress isn’t a bad option. It does have a lot of capability.
There are two blogs I had before my Gaia blog, but have only posted on either a couple of times. Live Journal and My Opera are different in that they emphasize the social aspect and have types of functions you won’t find on many blogging platforms. Both are major sites, and Live Journal in particular is very well established.
I joined Live Journal because of people I knew from MBTI forums. I belong to some groups on Live Journal, but I haven’t visited them in a long time. Live Journal is very basic in how it looks. However, I care more about functionality than looks and Live Journal has much to offer.
My Opera was the blog I started right before this one. I joined there because my favorite blogger (Quentin S. Crisp) posts there. The downside I found was that there were a fair number of non-English blogs, but that could be seen as a positive in that it attracts an international crowd. Even though My Opera is not very well known, its a major site that is quite impressive. I’m surprised that it rarely gets brought up in comparisons between Blogger and WordPress.
There are really good bloggers using all of these. A good blogger is a good blogger even on a simple blogging site, and vice versa. I want to explore other people’s blogs on these sites to see what others are doing. I’m also going to start posting on my own new blogs.
Here are the links to the 4 blogs I’m now focused on:
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/
http://benjamindavidsteele.blogspot.com/
Access: Public 
Marmalade 
Marmalade said
My experiment began just now. I posted a blog about blogging on each site.
Live Journal actually was more confusing than I expected. I posted or thought I did, but couldn’t figure out if it actually posted or not. It showed as posted. Nonetheless, when I looked for it,I couldn’t find itwith my previous posts. Maybe there is a lag for posts to show. I’ll have to check it later.
Word Press was also confusing. Both Live Journal and Word Press were very cluttered. On Word Press, I couldn’t even figure out how to place a title on my post. I spent 10 minutes trying to figure it out, and ended up posting it without a title.
Blogger was easier. The page did freeze up, but that might’ve been connection issues unrelated to the site. I opened a new window and it seemed fine. One significant problem was that I wanted to remove a paragraph, but was unable. The “cut” option seemed to be disabled in my IE7 browser. So, I had to manually delete it using the “backspace” button. I’d hope that a major browser would work with a major site like that. I have some problems with Internet Exploerer here on Gaia, but I have lower expectations for this site.
The last site was My Opera. It was simple and easy. It has many options and yet isn’t cluttered. It felt very intuitive and posted without a single problem.
My Opera wins the first round of the experiment. Its hard to say who came in second, but offhand I’ll give second place to Blogger.
Nicole said
it will be cool to see how the experiment progresses!
starlight said
LOL…you’re a trip Ben…i was wondering what you been up to…joy*
Marmalade said
Nice to see you both. Happy Happy Joy Joy 🙂
Because all of the praise I read about it, my guess is that I’ll like Word Press if I ever figure it out. I’m not sure why I couldn’t find the section for the title. I downloaded the new version (2.7 I believe) and maybe I was just experiencing a glitch. I’ll try it again. Someone from work brought up their Word Press page for posting and it looked entirely different. It might also be browser related. I’ll try my other browsers as part of this experiment.
I checked back with Live Journal. I still couldn’t find the entry I tried to post with the other previous entries. I kept the window open, and I was able to go back to the page that showed the posting. It seems to be posted somewhere. Its possible that Live Journal has the capacity for posting on multiple pages and somehow I unintentionally posted it on another page. If so, I need to learn how to control which page it posts to.
Marmalade said
Second Round:
I used Google Chrome this time. I didn’t have any of the problems I had last time. I like Google Chrome. It seems to have less compatability issues with the blogging sites.
Its strange with Word Press. The appearance of it was the same. I put the title where I tried to put it last time, but for unknown reasons it allowed the title to appear this time. I do like the Category option Word Press. The closest thing I had to a problem was that I couldn’t sign into my Word Press blog on the page of my blog. Instead, I had to go to the main page to sign in.
Nobody wins first place this time. This round is a tie, but I’m thinking I’m going to learn to like Word Press more and more.
Marmalade said
There is one thing that this test is making clear. Gaia competesfairly wellwith the otherblogging sites. There aren’t as many choices here in terms of functions, but there is still plenty one can do. Gaia is very simple and intuitive. I’ve never had any major problems in blogging here.
Nicole said
that’s good to know, about Gaia and Google Chrome. I have the latter but haven’t used it much yet, force of habit.
Marmalade said
Yeah, Google Chrome seems decent. I haven’t had any major issues like I had with Internet Exploer 8 which made my virus scan non-functional. It took me a while to realize there was a problem. I hope I didn’t pick up any viruses. IE8=BAD!!!
The problem with Google Chrome is that it has compatability issues with playing videos. Whereas I’ve never had problems with videos with Internet Explorer. You just can’t have everything. I guessI have to choose whether you like blogging or watching videos more.
Annemieke said
“I couldn’t sign into my Word Press blog on the page of my blog. Instead, I had to go to the main page to sign in.”
Yes, very strange indeed. I mostly stay logged in, but when for some reason I have to sign in, I always wonder where I have to do that again.
“Gaia is very simple and intuitive.”
Totally agree with that. No matter how good I find WordPress, intuitive would not be a term to use. Although I am more and more ‘getting it’ lately.
I also like Google Chrome and at the moment I use it together with Internet Explorer. For some reason I like IE still best for bookmarking sites. But I noticed it is good to use other browsers to see how it all looks, because sites can look rather different with other browsers sometimes.
I so like that you share this kind of struggles. I am going through the same processes at times. But I totally love it.
Marmalade said
Its getting close to bedtime for me, but I shall comment first.
Yes, Annemieke, I prefer Internet Exploer overall. Maybe its because I’ve used it the most and I’m familiar with it. I never had major issues with it until I downloaded IE8.
You like that I share this kind of struggle… is that you’re way of saying you don’t want to hear me share my struggles withchanging my cats’ litter box? Sadly, neither Google Chrome nor Internet Exploer is compatible with the litter box. I should get a virtual cat with a virtual litter box. It would immensely simplify my life.
Centria said
I love your analysis here. I was convinced blogger (blogspot? are they the same thing?) was going to be the best option. But within a day of posting there, I switched allegiance to wordpress. Even though some of the layouts are confusing, it seems easier for others to find your work through the categories and tags. No one has even found the blogger posting. But wordpress has proved more visible and likeable. Gaia, though, is simple and intuitive. It’s still preferable in many ways….
Marmalade said
Blogger and blogspot are related but not the same… both relate to blogging with Google. Its technically more appropriate to say blogspot I suppose, but for some reason I was using the Blogger name instead. I was meaning the same thing anyways.
You seem attracted to Word Press for the same reasons as I. The category and tag system will be very helpful as I gather more blogs. I’m glad they also help others to find my blogs. That will be part of my comparison experiment. I’ll see which of my blogs get the most comments and what kinds of commenters they attract.
Marmalade said
Third Round:
This time I used the Opera browser which is related to the Opera blogging site. It was a very easy to use browser except for one factor. When I tried to copy and paste from my Gaia blog, it didn’t carry over the hyperlinks. Both Google Chrome and Internet Explorer carry over hyperlinks.
I ended the third round at that point. So, none of the blogging sites were a winner in this round, but the Opera browser was the loser.
Marmalade said
For the time being, I take my conclusion back for the Third Round. The hyperlink copy/paste problem seems to be failing on all of my browsers. That is very odd because it was just working. Is it something to do with my computer? Or are the various browsers somehow causing problems for eachother? I hope I can figure this out.
Nicole said
oooh, that’s a very annoying problem. really odd!
Marmalade said
I’m bringing my experiment into a less formal mode. I decided to drop LIve Journal from the experiment just because the set up is somewhat confusing and not aesthetically pleasing. I’m going to continue to use the other 3 for a while. At the moment, I can’t say I entirely favorany one of themover the rest.
Nicole said
ok. i see you’re still having that words running into each other trouble!