Thursday 23 March 2006

Pic of the day: "Enough planning! I'll just take more drastic measures!"

Blogger

It began because one of my LiveJournal friends (Earthmystic) became restless with LJ, and decided to move his journal to his main site. He then tested out something called "RSS syndication" (or perhaps syndication is the last S there, depending on who you ask). Evidently this is a form of micro-publishing that lets you easily export news, blogs etc in a format that can be read many places, including on my LJ friends page.

This again led me to see the "syndication" of a friend of his, the Grateful Bear, another mystic of sorts. His blog was of the Blogger variant, so after a little while I made an account there. It is free, and it is currently owned by Google, the company whose official motto is "don't be evil". I very much agree with that. Also, I have good experiences with Google in the past, and now recently with their Gmail. So it is like a seal of approval. (And of course it helps that I wrote about the need for Google before they were officially founded.)

Blogger is not a born member of the Google family though, but rather adopted. It was an early mover in the blog movement, although they probably took their name from the concept rather than the other way around.

***

These days, blogging is very popular. Back when I started to write the Chaos Node, blogging was either not invented or at least nobody talked about it. A few of us wrote online diaries or personal journals, although I did not know there were others when I started. I even searched for it on Altavista (Google did not exist yet) and found nothing (because, by today's standard, Altavista sucked). So I never made a blog. Even as late as when I started my LiveJournal, to keep in touch with my friends from Acid Reflux, people did not think of it as blogging. I think the first bloggers were starting around that time, but it was a more specialized form of journal where you did not write about yourself but comments on things you linked to on the web. Including other blogs, not least. Thus the name "weblog" which became "blog".

LiveJournal is actually an excellent blogging tool. You can get started in minutes with a default layout, you can make your own styles later or just include HTML in your entries. It has an advanced commenting system where you can comment on comments and their comments, unlike the early blogs which used to link to each other and then write comments in their own blogs. You automatically get an email (if you want) when someone posts a comment in your LiveJournal.

Well, Blogger is similar now. It has a less advanced commenting system, where you cannot comment on comments (or at least I have not found a way to do it, and the grateful bear just wrote comments to his own entry to answer to comments too, so I assume that's the way you do it). Minus points for that. Even though you give your email address to Blogger when it sets up your blog, you have to give it again elsewhere (Settings/Comments) to get notification on comments. Minus for that too.

On the other hand, Blogger is just as easy to get started with, and it offers you a choice of many beautiful layouts which look professional with no thinking required, much less any knowledge of HTML or CSS. For those who have such knowledge, modifying your "template" (layout) or rewriting it entirely is in your hands, and very easy to do. You can host your blog on the standard Blogspot site for free, or wherever else you find the space. You can include services from competitors, such as MSN search.

You can also include context-sensitive Google ads, as many or as few as you want (including zero). If people actually click on your ad, you will supposedly be paid. I seriously doubt I will do this, although I like Google ads, they are as relevant as you come with today's technology. Still, I don't expect that much traffic, and anyway I doubt Google supports relevant ads for Nynorsk (New Norwegian, the Norwegian minority language that is my mother tongue).

***

So yeah, I set up a Norwegian blog eventually. I told you I was considering that. Now I did. The Norwegian LiveJournal was a fiasco because I restricted myself to a very narrow topic, when the audience was already minimal because of the language. This time I will write about anything that goes on in my life. Then my Norwegian relatives will not need to read English to know what's on my mind, whether it is my dinner or the climate or Norwegian politics.

The address to Blogger is naturally www.blogger.com/. As for my New Norwegian journal, "Kaosnodeland", it is found on http://kaosnodeland.blogspot.com/. I also have a link to it from the front page here, and a link back.

Although I may go a bit overboard on my new Blogger journal the first few days, I have no doubt that the original (and best!) Chaos Node will remain my main site, my home on the Net and the best way to learn to know who I really am. Not to mention a never drying wellspring of anime pictures and game screenshots! Hey, you can't please all the people all the time, but it's worth a try...