January 23, 2002

10:37 AM

Evan Williams says an interim version of Blogger Pro will be launched this week, and last night he demoed it for the Weblogger Interest Group in Mountain View. New stuff: automatic weblogs.com ping, image posting, draft posting, and post to the past.
posted by tranquileye (30 comments total)

Anil compiled a list of talked-about features, back when they were being worked on and tested a year ago.
posted by mathowie at 10:56 AM on January 23, 2002

For those of us who don't have the time or ambition to learn html/php and whose last experience with programming was in the Borland Turbo years it's worth $30-$50 a year. The 100k per month limit might be a pest on team blogs though.
posted by revbrian at 11:15 AM on January 23, 2002

Is this innovative stuff or catch-up stuff? I don't use Blogger anymore, so I'm a little behind on its merits and lapses.
posted by donkeyschlong at 11:55 AM on January 23, 2002

hm, for some reason i thought 3bruces was using greymatter... . but yeah, blogger is definitely a useful tool for those looking to just easily put up their content (Bam!). i'm not sure how many of the people who always say they'd pay for blogger would actually sign up for this service, but i hope a lot of them too. ev definitely deserves the funds for keeping it going.
posted by lotsofno at 11:57 AM on January 23, 2002

What about a Comments feature? That's where Blogger is suffering; all those 3rd party commenting tools have (seemingly) collapsed under the strain of hundreds of thousands of bloggers. And all the "install your own" services like moveabletype offer a commenting feature built in now, don't they? Blogger Pro seems underwhelming to me.
posted by bcwinters at 11:58 AM on January 23, 2002

The last thing we need is more Weblog software. There's too many of these sites already. We don't need "hundreds of thousands," especially when the same opinions, links and reactions are repeated over and over.

I submit that we have a two-year moratorium on new weblogs. Let the excess population die off.
posted by Erendadus at 12:15 PM on January 23, 2002

Are people's personal websites personally sucking the life out of you? That's sad. Fortunately for you, Erendadus, I will debut my new weblogging tool, called "E-Boundaries" soon. It monitors your vital signs, so that when you don't like a site, you actually stop reading it and forget all about it, and have one less thing to be a crank about.

Anyway: bcwinters is totally right. Blogger is most useful as a beginner and intermediate tool: what's missing is stuff like a commenting system, also listed on Anil's roundup. Most of us (by "us" I mean "not me!") who would use something like automated RSS would be able to build our own comments.
posted by RJ Reynolds at 12:36 PM on January 23, 2002

Why would anyone want to pay $5 a month for that? You can get a domain hosted with a cgi-bin and PHP for a buck or two more.

Sure, some people lack experience installing scripts but, if you can't follow the instructions for installing MovableType or GreyMatter, it's not that hard to find someone who will install it for you.
posted by Xkot at 12:45 PM on January 23, 2002

Post to the past? Isn't that revisionist history?
posted by laz-e-boy at 12:45 PM on January 23, 2002

If you can't follow the instructions for installing MT then you can pay them to do it for you.

But Blogger Pro is still cool. If it had come out three months ago then I'd be there, but I'm an MT baby now.
posted by nedrichards at 1:05 PM on January 23, 2002

I'm switching to Moveable Type because it's got better features than Blogger Pro, and I'm tired of Blogger's quicks, instability, and down time (which don't make me eager to try Blogger Pro).

Post to the past? Isn't that revisionist history?

Nah, it's just following the example of Congress. They can "revise and extend" their remarks for publication in the Congressional Record.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:06 PM on January 23, 2002

Has anyone tried pMachine? I'm thinking of giving it a whirl.
posted by jonah at 1:09 PM on January 23, 2002

Automatically posts inline images. Very cool.

As Blogger has a web interface how did they do that?
posted by holloway at 1:10 PM on January 23, 2002

[i thought 3bruces was using greymatter]

Nope - played with it a little but got no farther. I like blogger, but to each his own...
posted by revbrian at 1:17 PM on January 23, 2002

some might say i am a pMachine; i should probably not drink so much soda.
posted by moz at 1:26 PM on January 23, 2002

btw. With MT you can post to whenever you want. I've got a few upcoming posts on hold set to the 22nd Noverember 2006 (just so they stay at the top of the list)
posted by nedrichards at 1:26 PM on January 23, 2002

FWIW, I haven't updated that Pro info page in a year, except to fix links. I was using Pro later that month and the description of features is pretty accurate. Comments were not among them, however.
posted by anildash at 1:36 PM on January 23, 2002

I'd like to know what other people are using for their blog software. I'm not exactly thrilled with my own big bad LiveJournal but it's free and I didn't have to really *do* anything.

I know that MT has some fans, and that El Blogger does too, but I want to know what gets the real mileage in the real world. I'm lookin to switch and I want to know what people think. Thanks.
posted by verso at 1:56 PM on January 23, 2002

verso, MovableType all the way. I used Blogger until I wanted to do comments (and after the security break), I have also used Greymatter in the past, which is a good (but sort of un-polished) program. MovableType, however, has completely blown me away. It has all the features you could want, a fantastic interface, and the support for it is incredible. Really incredible. It should be noted that MovableType was the most difficult to install, but I did it after trying a couple times, and I had next to 0 experience installing scripts, and most of the problems were my Hosts fault. My 2 cents, anyway.
posted by untuckedshirts at 3:19 PM on January 23, 2002

hm, for some reason i thought 3bruces was using greymatter

Nope lotsofno, I just can't convince revbrian to ditch Blogger! I use Greymatter for news posts on another site I maintain and I'd much rather use it for our blog - if for no other reason because I've got nobody else to bitch at if it isn't working! BloggerPro sounds okay but it really doesn't address many of my issues with Blogger. I see nothing about guaranteed uptime - that would be my first and foremost reuqest!

Unfortunately, MovableType won't run on our server since it uses many PHP commands which aren't in the version our host uses. Dern.
posted by RevGreg at 4:28 PM on January 23, 2002

Unfortunately, MovableType won't run on our server since it uses many PHP commands which aren't in the version our host uses. Dern.

MT is written entirely in perl. Did you mean your host doesn't have the right version of Perl?
posted by mathowie at 4:33 PM on January 23, 2002

Has anyone tried pMachine? I'm thinking of giving it a whirl.

Just installed it. So far, so good, plus Rick (pMachine author) is great w/tech support.
posted by laz-e-boy at 4:34 PM on January 23, 2002

MT is written entirely in perl. Did you mean your host doesn't have the right version of Perl?

Eeep! Mea culpa! I was working on a PHP script at the time and well...you get the idea...
posted by RevGreg at 6:58 PM on January 23, 2002

I started with blogger, have tried GreyMatter, am currently using Movabletype, I installed PMachine to give it a look and there is much to like it does require php and mysql however. Rick the author was very helpful with a couple of questions i had, but I'll probably stick with Movabletype I've had no problems with it and the more I use it the more I like it. The support is also very good. The new blogger just doesn't appear to add that much new.
posted by onegoodmove at 10:57 PM on January 23, 2002

I used to use pitas and now am using Greymatter. For the average blogger (on an individual blog), are there any large benefits to switching to Moveable Type?
posted by Charmian at 3:50 AM on January 24, 2002

Has anyone tried pMachine? I'm thinking of giving it a whirl.

I also installed it over the weekend and I like its features so far, especially the pBlocks feature which can be used to deploy random quotes, images or pretty much anything else in places on your site.
posted by thescoop at 7:25 AM on January 24, 2002

I'm completely biased, but yeah... commenting (and friends lists) are damn important. That's LiveJournal's big plus - community.

For creating a news-oriented weblog that's hosted on your own site, LiveJournal isn't the way to go for many people. It can do more than most people think, however. See http://www.techrose.org for an example of a LiveJournal embedded site.

That's part of the problem with LJ, if anything. It is too damn easy to make an acceptable looking LJ site without a lot of effort, and often appearance isn't as important to our users as functionality. Most people don't bother. I wish more did.

Still... C'mon. You love us. Admit it.
posted by insomnia_lj at 6:21 PM on January 24, 2002

Is this innovative stuff or catch-up stuff?

Sounds very much like catch-up. I'm disappointed they haven't thought about modular templates, too.
posted by walrus at 3:58 AM on January 25, 2002

hey, looks like it is up
posted by eckeric at 3:11 PM on January 25, 2002

And I was wrong about the templates. OTOH, it looks at least comparable in functionality to any of the other systems out there now. Definitely worth the money if you don't want to mess around with perl scripts.
posted by walrus at 3:34 PM on January 25, 2002