A Comparison of Blog Providers
I chose three providers of free blogs: Blog-City, LiveJournal and Bravenet. At first I also considered including Free ESL-Blogs, but I found their blogs too simplistic and therefore dropped this provider. I opened accounts with these providers and created the following blogs:
http://sarolta.blog-city.com/, http://www.livejournal.com/users/sarolta_gv/ and
http://sarolta.bravejournal.com/.
Setting up the accounts with the providers was not too difficult. However, I do prefer Blogger`s user-friendliness in three steps.
From experience I know that my students tend to have difficulties with setting the language of their documents and using a spell-checker. Therefore a spell-checking facility would need to be provided. Unfortunately, beside Blogger only LiveJournal provides this facility. Does that mean the others do not care? Perhaps their customers spell their words correctly.
Editing your entry is important. Students may want to change their posts, correct a mistake they notice after the post was published, etc. However, you cannot edit your posts in Blog-City - at least I could not find the way to do it.
All companies provide options for adjusting the template of your blog to your likes: Bravenet offers the widest option. Among other extra facilities they also offer the facility to incorporate your photos in the blog, including images, lines and tables in your posts. However, a Bravenet blog comes with a package: the blog is packed with advertisements for free Bravenet products. I could not get rid of them. They are distracting the reader from the blog`s contents.
A calendar is included in Blog-City and LiveJournal blogs. Getting one free with Bravenet should not be a problem as it is widely advertised. Getting one in Blogger though seems to be a problem.
Both LiveJournal and Bravenet provide information on and services for your friends. They seem to be more suitable for the journal type of blogs, especially as they provide either descriptions of your mood or smilies that symbolize the way you feel when you are writing. Many a journal writer would definitely appreciate that, I guess.
Blog-City posts could not be written with my Netscape. They seem to prefer Microsoft Explorer. However, they provide simple statistics on visitor traffic, which is nice.
All in all, this was a healthy exercise. It helped me learn about some of the other free blog providers and appreciate the user-friendliness of Blogger even more.
http://sarolta.blog-city.com/, http://www.livejournal.com/users/sarolta_gv/ and
http://sarolta.bravejournal.com/.
Setting up the accounts with the providers was not too difficult. However, I do prefer Blogger`s user-friendliness in three steps.
From experience I know that my students tend to have difficulties with setting the language of their documents and using a spell-checker. Therefore a spell-checking facility would need to be provided. Unfortunately, beside Blogger only LiveJournal provides this facility. Does that mean the others do not care? Perhaps their customers spell their words correctly.
Editing your entry is important. Students may want to change their posts, correct a mistake they notice after the post was published, etc. However, you cannot edit your posts in Blog-City - at least I could not find the way to do it.
All companies provide options for adjusting the template of your blog to your likes: Bravenet offers the widest option. Among other extra facilities they also offer the facility to incorporate your photos in the blog, including images, lines and tables in your posts. However, a Bravenet blog comes with a package: the blog is packed with advertisements for free Bravenet products. I could not get rid of them. They are distracting the reader from the blog`s contents.
A calendar is included in Blog-City and LiveJournal blogs. Getting one free with Bravenet should not be a problem as it is widely advertised. Getting one in Blogger though seems to be a problem.
Both LiveJournal and Bravenet provide information on and services for your friends. They seem to be more suitable for the journal type of blogs, especially as they provide either descriptions of your mood or smilies that symbolize the way you feel when you are writing. Many a journal writer would definitely appreciate that, I guess.
Blog-City posts could not be written with my Netscape. They seem to prefer Microsoft Explorer. However, they provide simple statistics on visitor traffic, which is nice.
All in all, this was a healthy exercise. It helped me learn about some of the other free blog providers and appreciate the user-friendliness of Blogger even more.
posted by Sarolta at
11:23 pm
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