Saturday, November 24, 2007

Blogging Dilemmas

After playing around with a few different blogging platforms, I've come to be really happy with blogger for my daily bloggings. However, I'm thinking of starting up a separate blog for Loki once he arrives, and although at first I just assumed I'd do it here on blogger as well, I'm wondering if I should instead consider other options.

Loki's blog would mainly be a place to post pictures and updates for the grandparents, family, and anyone else who's interested, to read and enjoy. That way I don't innundate this blog with the million pictures I'm sure to take of this kid, and people who just want to read about him don't have to wade through my daily random thoughts. ; ) Since many of the people I'd want to write the blog for aren't that good at reading blogs, I'd also probably set up a feedblitz newsletter that would email the posts to them (with their permission, of course).

One of my concerns is that I want to make it as easy as possible to upload and post pictures. Blogger's ok, I have 1GB of storage space for this username which is a decent amount and has worked well enough so far b/c I usually post reduced sized pictures... although that's kind of a pain in the butt, and time consuming, and I know I'll want to just upload the pictures right off the camera and won't have the time/patience to go through and re-size them all the time. And if I'm wanting this to be any sort of a long-term deal I'm afraid I'd run out of room quickly by uploading full-sized images.

Looking at the other free blogging options, I remembered vox.com. I was very impressed to see that they offer 2GB of storage space, per month. For free. They also have a direct link with flickr, making it easy to transfer pictures over and post them (and those wouldn't count towards the 2GB of space allotted, either). So that's a definite plus.

However-- it's much more of a closed community, in that you have to be a member in order to post comments. You get a lot less freedom with setting up your page and sidebars, etc. Also, and this may sound silly, but blogging sites like Vox and xanga.com are definitely built to be more of networking blogging sites, what with the subscriptions and neighborhoods, etc. Blogger, however, is a bit more isolated-- which I kind of like for my personal, daily blog, and was kinda wanting also for Loki's blog.

Of course as I'm writing that I'm realizing that I've lately been blessed to meet some really cool people randomly through this blog, and why would it be a bad thing to be in a more connected blogging network?

So I don't know... I may set up a practice site and play around with it to see how I like it before deciding.

8 comments:

  1. wordpress is also excellent (and free). i registered there for the likely eventual migration there and found the digs to be comfy and user-friendly.

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  2. maybe you could just splurge a little tiny bit and get typepad!

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  3. I have seen many people branch off in to sever blogger blogs for this reason or that. Also on flickr many people create an account just to track the child. I wonder will you really be writing that much about Loki or more captioning photos and spending time with him, life is sure to be different ;)

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  4. somebody is quite excited :p I'd recommend blogger itself for Loki. You can use Microsoft picture manager to reduce the file size. It takes hardly a few minutes, the size can be brought down to a tenth of the original.

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  5. Yeah, wordpress and typepad seem nice, but I'd have to pay in order to even make up the same amount of space that blogger gives me for free. I dunno, I may just stick here after all.

    Melanie- One of the goals I have is to write monthly updates/letters to the baby like Heather on dooce.com does. I really love that idea, and seems like a fun way to write down and remember little things you'd otherwise easily forget over time.

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  6. Anonymous7:23 AM

    Does Vox offer a subscription service, like Xanga does, where you can have the posts sent to your email? That might work for Loki's blog, and you can either ask people to set up their own accounts just to get your posts, or you could even set it up for them.

    I dunno, other people have much better ideas and much more knowledge than I do on this kind of stuff...

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  7. Oh I remember hearing about his girl a while back. Yes that seems like a perfect idea, monthly, and you can write it all month when you get a minute to youself here and there.

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  8. I use typepad and have been very happy with it. You can buy a package where you can have multiple blogs all linked together or separate and work the designs how you wish.

    I sometimes upload photo to typepad but I also use Flickr to put photos up in my entries and it works very well.

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