I feel I've reached a decision on what I'm doing with this blog...
First up, I'd like to thank Steve Castledine for his excellent DominoBlog template. It's brilliant, and I couldn't have blogged without it. The fact that IBM bought the design says a lot about how powerful and flexible it is.
Having performed the upgrade, I have to say that I really do like the "blue rinse" look and feel. The upgrade itself was a snap, thanks to an agent that Steve provided (despite not being obliged to!).
The one problem I had was down to my own stupidity (and probably NTL's caching web proxies) more than anything else...
The only real issue I have with the upgraded blog template is the new editor, something I know Steve's aware of and hoping to deal with. And I can live with the new editor for the moment anyway.
But despite all of the great work that's gone into it, I still find myself drawn to Blogo. And that's for two fairly simple reasons:
- Blogo does almost everything via the web, whereas some things in the IBM Blog template need to be done via the Notes Client
- Blogo makes Articles easy
The latter item is very important to me. I want to put up more articles in the near future. Specifically, I've got a new shadow at work, and need to train him. I've had this crazy idea on compiling a kind of "open courseware" of brain dumps on pertinent topics, kind of like Show 'n' Tell Thursday but with a "teaching a geek" focus.
I'd rather be able to write and correct that kind of thing whilst still at work. (I have no NRPC hole in our firewall, so can't use a Notes client to do that.)
I'd always meant to make those kinds of articles available with DominoBlog, perhaps by creating pages. But I can only do that from a Notes client, which is why I'd never gotten around to doing anything about this.
Blogo makes it easier by allowing Articles, which can be rated by commenters if they wish - that should be useful. In fact, the whole Blogo articles system should allow a kind of "public conversation" between me and my shadow(s). Plus the text itself is something that could be re-used elsewhere if people want to.
Basically, Blogo's simplicity and focus on a web interface make it much easier for me to work with to do what I want to do.
Blogo is not, by the way, perfect. I'm going to have to build on Blogo to get all that I want from it. I intend to do more than a mere paint job on Blogo if I can, and hope to feed back anything I build to Ferdy as a matter of courtesy. I rather like the option to close commenting after
As and when I find a niggle, I intend to do what I can to fix it. (Blogo's lean 'n' clean design is what gives me hope that I can do this, by the way.)
A word on BlogSpere, before I close. Specifically, why I didn't evaluate it.
BlogSphere is great. It's a fantastic competitor to DominoBlog/the IBM Blog Template. And as such, I just felt it was a little too large for what I wanted. There's been a friendly arms-race between the two main blog templates for a while now, and that's resulted in more features and more complexity than I really want from a blog.
I had a quick look at BlogSphere, in its current beta incarnation. But to be absolutely honest, Blogo had already been (irrationally, emotionally) chosen and I felt that to do an evaluation in those circumstances was less than fair. BlogSphere has plenty of users in the Domino community, so I know it's a good reliable bit of code.
I also know, by that token, that the masses think I'm wrong.
Let 'em think that.
Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, and all that...
Comments (1)
philipstorry February 11th, 2007 16:46:18
I'm fairly certain, Philip, that no one feels terribly strongly about whether you should use a particular blog template. Steve, Declan and Ferdy have all done world-class work, and there are plenty of reasons to use ANY of those templates.
Now, if you wanted to use Sharepoint for your blog -- then I imagine some of your readers might have something to say about it. ;-)
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