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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

New Look And Sections

Ok, so it's not that big a new look workover, but I thought it would be good idea to give the site a bit of makeover for it's new style. So, gone is the old fluid layout, it was so Web 1.0. Now you get a nice simple fixed column in the middle - very Web 2.0.

38% Likely to be web famous!On top of that, there's a brand swanky new quiz that you can take to see if you ever likely to be a web star. If you're one of those people who like sticking things on your websites, you get a free badge as well.

The monthly polls and votes are gone, but past winners now live in the Version 1 archive - if you ever need to go there. The sites nominated in the past are still here on the blog also.

You get two brand new sections - The Hall of Internet Fame - where I'll be adding sites that have caught my attention, but in a less intensive way than I did on the blog previously. It's empty at the moment, but won't be for long.

If you've ever spotted a streak of sarcasm in some of my site posts, that aspect of my writing will now have it's own place to live (as well as the blog) with the all new Hall of Internet Shame. That'll be more feature article based - and I've got it off to a start with two articles I've been itching to right for a long time. Firstly, Annoying Web 2.0 Conventions and then The Top 25 Stupidly Named Web 2.0 Sites Of 2006 - check them out, see what you think.

And finally, there's now a newsletter you can sign up for. If I get enough people do so, I'll send out some updates and newslettery things. If you spot anything broken, or mistakes, let me know - I have to clean up now the sites live. You may need to Ctrl and F5 to get the new style sheet if you've been here previously. Any comments, thoughts, complaints, post 'em here. :)

Posted by Dio Bach at 11:00 PM 0 comments links to this post  

Friday, September 15, 2006

Praise For Blogger - But Now It's Going Dynamic

If you had to name your favourite web based service what would it be? Flickr? Gmail? Bloglines? Delicious? MySpace? Could be, but I want to brush them greats aside and say a few words of love for the much maligned Blogger.

Blogger in betaI had a panic recently when I learnt that Blogger was in beta testing for a new service which would match Wordpress' over-rated feature set and turn blogger into a publisher of dynamic DB driven pages. My heart sank.

For a few moments I saw years of devotion to an elegantly simple, highly customizable and downright addictive publishing platform in jeopardy. Then a moment later I spotted the saving light - these new features would only affect those using blogspot - blogger's own hosting service. It had made me think what I'd do without Blogger, and it wasn't pretty.

Knowing my self hosted sites would remain old fashioned HTML based and category-less, I was happy again. I could put my head back in the sand and continue not having to worry about things like hacked WordPress installations, security patches, software updates, SEO unfriendly templating and horror of horrors - having my content in an easily killable database rather than in hundreds of flat and easily retrievable files.

Blogger is much maligned for the amount of spam it has helped to propagate on the web and for lacking in features. But the spam came from the sheer simple immediacy of the platform. And as for the much trumpeted features like categories, I have to say I've never seen the point of them. Blogs are blogs, not directories. Given that I run about 15 blogs, this simplicity is a boon. Imagine having to sort out all the installations and updates over that amount of sites. It would be a full-time job I fear.

So what if blogger ever goes? I hope it don't and there's no reason it ever should, but if it does I can always annex all them real HTML pages I have and try something new in a new place.

So, let's hear it for my favourite web service - Blogger! Simply put, I love your blogger tags, I love how quickly I can integrate you into a site. I love your colours. I love you simplicity. I'd seriously love to pay for blogger - I feel guilty using the site so mercilessly for nothing.

Posted by Dio Bach at 11:57 PM 0 comments links to this post