Seeking New Blog Home

[livingdeb]

LiveJournal has been sold to the Russians and as such is now subject to Russian laws about privacy, etc. I tried to read, or at least skim through, the new regulations, but they basically said only two things: 1) read and agree to these and 2) we are switching to Russian regulations (which, in spite of all the pages we are making you read, there is no information on these regulations here).

Googling appears to indicate that the new regulations are very similar. There is no need for alarm.

Yet, all my Bostonian LiveJournal friends are jumping ship and moving to Dreamwidth, which is apparently an open-source version of LiveJournal with no ads. I love the idea of an open-source provider with no ads. (No, I don't know how they afford their staff.) However, they don't currently have photo hosting, which you can get with a paid subscription to LiveJournal, though they are planning to add it. I don't currently use photo hosting, but I would like to. I haven't had pictures here in eons.

But another choice is Blogspot. Some of my other friends use that and it's prettier and nicer than LiveJournal and I kind of regretted not starting there after I had been blogging for a while.

I don't want to make the mistake I made in grad school: The first year in the dorm was so great that I stayed in the dorm a second year. Unfortunately, all the great people moved out and the new people were way less fun. Finally the third year I called around and found one of the great people who needed a roommate.

So I'm going to take this opportunity to jump ship, just as soon as I decide which new ship to jump to.

Any opinions?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think the 2 main choices are Blogger (formerly BlogSpot - now owned by Google) or Wordpress. Blogger is free, easy, and basic. No fancy plugins to worry about, but you basically get what you get. They do have a nice "reader" that allows you to easily keep track of blogs you subscribe to.

Wordpress gives you many more options. You can get a free wordpress account hosted on their servers (it will have their ads on it), or you can download it for free and host it yourself. You have many more choices in terms of themes and plugins, but it's also a bit more complicated. Basically, I use Blogger for my personal blog, and Wordpress for business.

Good luck with it!
:-) Cat

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Long ago I looked into WordPress for various reasons, and even though I'm comfortable with html, it looked like there were other headaches, so I decided against WordPress. Or maybe I just decided it wouldn't work for a regular non-blog homepage like I hoped it would, at least not without lots of extra work.

I'd never heard of Dreamwidth before last week. But I still think I would be happiest with it or Blogger. Still researching a little more.

I *think* all I care about is writing posts, including pictures, and allowing comments, ideally in some non-annoying way. People here have definitely had trouble with comments, but I think the same is true of Blogger. Oh, I do like the reader, too--and LiveJournal/Dreamwidth has one, too. Of course there would be different people on it! Oh, at tags (and both have tags).

[(Anonymous)]

I'm pretty happy with Blogger. The reader allows you to follow any blog (it doesn't have to be a Blogger blog) as long as it has an rss feed (which most do.) There isn't really a Blogger "community" per se - unless I'm just oblivious to it. I used to have a blog through Salon.com - their blogging platform was called Open Salon. They had an active and connected blogging community, but you couldn't really connect to people blogging on other platforms. Not sure if it even still exists or not.

Anyhow, I've never heard of Dreamwidth either - but do let us all know whatever you decide, because I still want to follow your blog!
:-)
Cat