I find myself always saying, I wish I had known then what I know now. That could not have been more true in this blogging experience. I’m not a very technical person. Being married to a software developer, I know my way around a computer better than most, but alas, I don’t know much about programming. I don’t know how to do HTML or CSS and even though I can learn things pretty quickly, I demand ease of use in any software I run. A bad interface is a bad interface, whether you know how to program or not. Even the most tech savvy person appreciates a good UI. That’s why geeks buy Macs and iPods.

When I started this whole blogging thing, I had no idea what I was getting into. My husband suggested I blog, never having any idea that within a few short months I would surpass his blog stats and instead of being his wife, he became my husband. After all, he’s the writer in the family with six books under his belt, and I’m a stay at home mom. The problem was he didn’t realize I’d hit the ground running and unfortunately, he’d be the target of my sense of humor. He also had no idea that one single entry I wrotewould be such a big hit in the blogosphere. Last night he says to me “I miss Jeremiah (his brother)” and I said “I miss Jeremiah too” then thinking about it, I added, “If he lived close by I would have SO MUCH blog fodder it wouldn’t be funny. I could go on for YEARS. I would have gotten MONTHS of mileage out of the time he took that IQ test in school and fell asleep during the testing.” (In case you were wondering, he ended up with results somewhere in the mentally retarded range.) Steve laughed and said “Yeah, lucky for him he’s not here.” I don’t really understand these people that say “I have nothing to write about.” My friend, Susan, says that all the time. I could spend a month writing about stuff her husband did in the last few years and I don’t even live with him. Like the time he flooded her laundry room with beer from a keg thinking that turbo carbonating his home brew was a good idea. Had that been me, I would have had photographs and video and quite a few entries about ankle deep beer in my laundry room.

But I digress, I was talking about the platform you use to tell about all this. When I started, Steve suggested I use MSN Spaces. Being a Microsoft employee, he felt loyalty is important. I feel I have put in my time at Spaces and now it is time to move on. Now that I know what’s out there, Spaces pales in comparison. Sure, it’s not the worst thing out there but there’s an inherit bias against people using Spaces and I’m quite tired of it. So I went out and tried a bunch of blog platforms and what follows is my experience.

There are several blog platforms that I immediately eliminated due to certain qualities. Any blog platform that requires programming skills was immediately eliminated, like Movable Type. Any platform that required hosting, like Greymatter, was eliminated because I can’t use our home server due to the fact that it couldn’t handle the amount of traffic I have periodically gotten. Even though we have a dedicated server, tens of thousands of hits a day can not be handled by your average server. Bandwith limits are very important in blogging.

Any of the more teeny bopper blog platforms like MySpace and Multiply were immediately deemed inappropriate for my needs. The last requirement that I had is that it be free. With so many people giving it away, why would I pay Typepad to use their services? They offer a 30 day free trial, but what happens at the end of that trial if you decide not to continue? I don’t want to lose a month’s worth of work over it. Or better yet, if they raise fees after a year or I decide to go elsewhere, and I lose a year’s worth of work? No thanks.

I evaluated the blogs in many different areas. Ease of use was essential to me. I looked for how easy it was to log in, find my way around, add entries, add tags and categories (after all, how will search engines find you?)

I want stat counters, feed stats and referrals. It is critical to know where your traffic is coming from and who is reading your blog if you want to improve. It’s important to know who is talking about you and where your bread is buttered. Although, because of my tendency towards the irreverent, I’m not too worried about who got offended when I said a bad word. Speaking of bad words, I’m not thrilled when a blog decides what words I can and can’t say. Especially if you let me say shit but not boobs.

Advertising is a way to make a little money while blogging. The problem becomes the amount of ads on your blog (can we say Las Vegas?) or that some javascript can do harmful things. I hear of these bloggers that make loads of money from ads, but at the same time, I’m not willing to compromise my integrity or the look of my blog for ads. It’s a personal decision, though.

Cool features and customization are always an added bonus to any blog. Some blogs are extremely bare-bones and limited in the customization they allow you to do without paid upgrades or plug ins. And speaking of plug ins, many blog platforms rely on third party features for their functionality. This is both difficult to use and can potentially be very problematic. It goes back to the whole ease of use I was talking about earlier. The blog needs to be easy to set up and easy to use for your average non-technical blogger.

Another important quality in a blog platform is the blog community itself and the perception people have of it. I’m really not looking for a bunch of teeny bopper flame wars. I’m not trying to date or join chat rooms. While these features are great for young, single people, the vast majority of my readers and peers do not fall into this category. Nor does my blogging style. If you want to know what it’s like to have a tantruming child at your feet while blogging, an 85 pound Labrador standing on top your glass-topped bar or raisins stuck to your keyboard, I’m your blog. If you want to find a date to the prom or a new wife, I’m afraid you’ll have to go elsewhere. If you’re going to debate politics or religion, you should know I bore easily and don’t have the attention span for that sort of thing. I’ll read a whole book about chocolate or parenting, but don’t make me suffer through why George Bush should be impeached. Or why we should pull out of Iraq. I’m already boring myself just thinking about typing the topic sentences.

So here you go. Here’s what I discovered about the various blog platforms using the criteria above. Your mileage may vary.

MSN Spaces

I’ve been using Spaces for about a year. It has progressively improved, however, Microsoft went live with the new Windows Live Spaces before it should have ever seen the public eye. The problems are too numerous to list in total, but the problems are why I’ve left Spaces. There are massive log in problems, the pages sometimes take MINUTES to load, data is frequently lost, and many more problems. I tried using Windows Live Writer for entries, but you still have to interact with the Spaces Live software if you want to do anything else.

Spaces is fairly easy to use and intuitive. There’s a limited number of categories that you can use to try to tag your entries, and you can only use one at a time. There is also a maximum of 20. This feature has been broken for months though, so I don’t even know if they are planning on fixing it. As of now you can not add/delete/modify categories.

The stat counter is not very good. And every time they update the site, it breaks. For a week or two or longer. You can not see feed stats, which would be a useful feature since most of the people who read my blog use RSS feeds.

Spaces has recently added advertising. They use BrightAds/Kanoodle. They are quite obviously partners with Spaces, because their software often breaks for lengthy periods of time- days and weeks. You’re S.O.L. for the time it was was down, although they have never sent me a check, so the perception that you get paid for click- throughs is merely an illusion. They also are unable to keep an accurate count of site traffic (impressions) and I suspect, click-throughs. 

Spaces has also added their own ads, which the user does not get paid for, and placed it as a giant banner ad at the top of your blog. Spaces blackmails you to get rid of it, stating that if you PAY for it, you can get rid of it. Consequently, I’ve had to look at an ugly, infected giant picture of a toenail for the last month. Frankly, it’s repulsive. What ad agency even thought that was a good idea? Feet are disgusting as a rule. It’s rare to find people without really ugly, messed up feet. But I have again digressed. Why on earth haven’t they followed the Google model and split revenue generated by the banner ads on MY blog? That way, everyone is a winner. Instead, Spaces is a winner, and I’m looking at rotten toenails.

There are some cool features and customizations in Spaces. Granted, I don’t know how to use many of them because they are all new, and only part of them work anyway. As for the range of backgrounds and themes, Spaces has the most choices of any of the other blogs. They also have several modules and gadgets, but if you’re not familiar with HTML, the gadgets are very difficult to implement. For all the bells and whistles that Spaces has, it’s one of the most intuitive of the platforms out there, which is probably why Steve wanted me to use it.  Spaces offers the most flexibility as far as layout and themes, however, the overall result does not look as good as some of the other platforms offering less flexibility.

Spaces has video, photo and photo album capabilities, although you can’t use Flickr. I’ve seen some sites that have Windows Media Player up and running within Spaces, but it’s beyond my technical abilities to do that. I needed Steve’s help to figure out how to put my own photos in my blog entries.

The Windows Live log in and registration process is an arduous task. Some of my readers told me that they could not complete it after multiple attempts in different browsers. I have found that I repeatedly get booted out and have to re-log in. With that happening several times an hour, it is a wonder I have not thrown my laptop out the window.

The perception of a blog platform as well as the community contribute to the overall perception of one’s blog. I’ve found that people have very negative feelings towards Spaces, often overriding the content that is there. The community itself is fairly civil and well-behaved, although if you look at Technorati’s most popular blogs, there aren’t any Spaces blogs there.

Overall, I’d say Spaces isn’t a bad platform. I expect the new problems with Live will eventually iron themselves out, although I must add that those problems are so severe that they are the main reason I left Spaces. That, and the negative perception of Spaces in the blogosphere. Use at your own risk. And take sedatives. The aggravation factor can cause rage and violence.

Xanga

Xanga is a pretty neat little platform. The problem is, not a lot of people have heard of it. The community seems to be comprised of young people, so perhaps if you surveyed a bunch of high school kids, they’d all have heard of it. I’ve actually been a member of Xanga for over a year, but that’s because I have a terrible crush on Zach Braffand he had a blog on Xanga way back when. I could tell from the traffic and comments he got that there was a tendency towards the flame wars of the younger folks. But the question becomes, is Zach going to attract that kind of traffic anyway? I’m sure that his fan base probably consists more of teens and young twenty-somethings than thirty-something mothers of two.

Xanga is interesting because they tried to make an intuitive graphical user interface, but they use so much HTML, it’s difficult for me to use. Seriously, I just don’t know what color 99CC66 is; I don’t speak Hex. Annoyingly, my husband does, but that’s another story….. They offer ways around knowing what 99CC66 is, but quite honestly, I find it confusing and scary. Why even show me 99CC66, just to terrify me that if I press a button, I can never go back and might end up with a Pepto Bismal Pink blog with orange lettering? They do give you the option of playing music on a loop when people visit your blog, but honestly, who do you hate enough to do that to?

Like others, Xanga offers more features and customization for paid upgrades. They also make you log-in a few times when using various features of the site. You have to keep logging in even though you tell it to remember you. I find that reminiscent of Spaces and annoying. They have this feature called Xanga Skins. Does that mean I can have a leopard print background? Or a bear skin rug? I’m not really sure what that means. And it brings up a scary blank box like you should know what to do. I experimented with it, just to tell you that I figured it out, but this is premium (paid) module. Also I don’t think I did it right, because I don’t know HTML and I think it required more than some copy and pasting. So much for my polar bear wall-hanging and stuffed dear heads.

They have an interesting features called Xangazon which, if you have premium service, allows you to get paid for it. Xangazon is an affiliation with Amazon.com and allows you to show things you’re currently reading, listening to or watching. The help file says:

You can automatically show the picture of the CD, book, video game, or movie that you select using the Xangazon feature. In fact, using your “Xangazon Settings” will let you configure both the location, and layout of your Xangazon selections.

They make it sound easy, but they lie. Ok, it wasn’t that hard, but I was under the mistaken impression you could add it to a sidebar. Instead, it appears in an entry. Appearing is good, but not how I wanted to do it. Perhaps there is a way to figure it out, but it’s not intuitive. It’s still a cool feature though, especially if you belong to a book club.

Xanga has photo and video capabilities and it appears you can create photo albums as well, although I did not fool around with these features.

I noticed that Xanga has a blocked users features, which Spaces does not have, which could have come in great handy for me. I had to disable trackbacks due to large amounts of spam on my Spaces blog and have had to do periodic scrubbings due to unwanted spam comments.

All in all, I think Xanga would be my second choice for a blog platform, it’s pretty easy to use, has a lot of cool features and flexibility.

Livejournal

I’m afraid Livejournal was my least favorite platform. The sheer amount of advertising on my blog was a real turn off, not to mention I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. I couldn’t figure out how to do a lot things on Livejournal. I found Livejournal to be, well, ugly. And I tried fiddling with it and I went from hideous to only slightly less hideous. I wasn’t happy with the choices of themes and colors. If you can’t do HTML, it appears that you would be very limited in choosing the look and feel of your blog.

I found the whole interface difficult to use and most definitely NOT intuitive. It looks like you can choose tags, but as far as I could tell, no way to get any kind of blog stats, feed information, or referral information. A deal killer for me. I suspect that if you knew HTML, there would be a way to put third party tools on your blog.

This was the only blog platform that got me an immediate comment from their community on a post. So I suspect that Livejournal’s blog community may be closer than others. Steve’s response when I said I had tried Livejournal was “Isn’t that the one 13 year old girls use?” Dunno, but I have seen bloggers from Livejournal out and about in the blogosphere.

Livejournal offers paid accounts, but with the dizzying menus, I can’t tell what you get for a paid account and what is for free.

Blogger

I know I have to be careful in how I express my distaste for Blogger, because I know I have quite a few readers who use it. But you blogspot people out there might want to check out another platform. Two words came to mind when I started trying to use Blogger: clunky and awkward.

I’m often a reader of people who use Blogger, and it’s fine from a reader standpoint. It could be a little more attractive, but it’s ok. The only thing I’m not crazy about is having to do authentication to write comments. There are better ways to do that, involving the blog owner, and not putting the burden on the reader. They do allow you to moderate your comments, which would be better than making readers authenticate. The blog owner chooses this feature.

Blogger is a little TOO stripped down for my tastes. Everything involves third party software. You need Flickr for photo albums, you need a third party for stat counters or referrals. You need Adsense for ads. There’s just not a lot Blogger does for you.

I did not like the customization features they had. I felt like I’d been there and done that. There was no individuality to the customization. Meaning, I looked through the themes and I knew a person who used every one of those themes and if I were to have a blogger blog, I wouldn’t want it to look exactly like 500,000 other people’s.

I did not see a way to do tags/catagories which is also a deal breaker for me. It did look fairly easy to insert pictures into your entries though I did not try it.

I think Blogger has a big following and the general perception of Blogger is good. The user community seems to be my peers, but I do think a wide variety of people have Blogger blogs. It’s doesn’t offer the social networking that some of the other blogs offer though like recently updated blogs module, top Blogger blogs or anything of that nature.

I think there are better platforms out there than Blogger, and while Blogger is not my style, I do think it’s adequate for many people’s needs.

WordPress 

WordPress is the Mercedes of the blog platforms. Smooth driving, good looking, and runs well. It was very easy for me to set up my new blog. The UI makes it really easy to navigate your way around. It has, by far, the best blog and feed stat counter that I’ve seen. It organizes them quite nicely showing you exactly how many views were from each incoming URL and how many views for each post.

I was thrilled with the easy way you can tag your blog, not to mention that you can use multiple tags for one entry. You can easily see at a glance incoming links, comments and posts from the “dashboard.” You can also see from this same page, the top WordPress blogs, fastest growing WordPress blogs, and top WordPress posts.

I love how easy it was to set up a blogroll. And maintaining it is just as simple. I set up Flickr for photo albums, and all the customizations were quite easy to set up and implement. For a paid upgrade you can customize further using CSS. I’m sure you’re already aware that I’ll be passing on that.

WordPress does not do ads. I think it’s one of the only major platforms NOT doing ads. But I’m willing to trade that for the clean look. The look and feel of WordPress is far better than any of the other blogs I tried. I’m also allowed to say slut and shit. I know that may not be important to everyone, but I don’t like being censored.  

I don’t know that much about the WordPress community and it’s perception; it seems to be mostly populated by techies, but I tried it because Robert Scobleuses it. I surmised that if Robert’s doing ok on it (he’s ranked at number 11 or so on Technorati) then it’s probably a pretty safe bet. Robert doesn’t seem to take a lot of crap either, so I suspect flame wars are kept to a minimum. I noticed Robert has links for his books to Amazon and Barnes and Noble. He also has his photo on the header. I think that means Robert is using CSS (but  maybe not), and I do not know if he’s getting paid for click-throughs. (If you’re worried, buy his book though and he’ll get paid. ;) )

So far I am extremely satisfied with WordPress. It could be the honeymoon period, but I open it up and instead of tensing up at the aggravation that is about to start like I was on Spaces, I find myself relaxing and enjoying writing again. And I’m sure you’ll all be happy you won’t have to hear me complain about Spaces anymore.

Update: The honeymoon period has worn off as I’ve tried to do more complex things on WordPress. I’m finding it is much more difficult to put pictures in blog entries if you don’t know HTML. The first time, I had to have Steve program in the HTML and he set up two tables, which I found didn’t look or work well outside of IE7. The tables are scalable if you make your browser window larger, but the photo does not scale down and squishes the text if you go smaller. The second time I put a photo in, I insisted on doing it myself because I can not wait for Steve every time I need to put a photo in. I did have to go into the HTML and edit it, but I accomplished the task by only deleting stuff to achieve the desired result. For someone who has NO experience using HTML, putting a photo inside an entry would be impossible unless you want to use a thumbnail size image. In all fairness, Spaces is the only other platform that I’ve attempted to put photos in and it was quite a bit easier in Spaces.

I also encountered difficulty today in WordPress when I wanted to edit the font color and font. I created a separate page for recipesand struggled mightily with editing it. I finally figured out how to put a link to it on my main page, but still can not figure out how to edit the category to file it under recipes. As far as I could tell, WordPress was the only platform that allows you to have completely separate pages. Pages are defined as being like posts except they live outside of the normal blog chronology and can be hierarchical. I’ve set up Windows Live Writer to publish on WordPress with the hope of circumventing some of these issues. I’m still very happy with WordPress and perhaps will become slightly more efficient with HTML soon. 

I also finally realized that I do indeed have an integrated spell checker with WordPress. Wahoo!

Another feature I discovered on WordPress today is that you can make individual pages private and password protected. I REALLY like this feature since I am opposed to publishing identifying pictures of my children but my family sometimes reads my blog. The other platforms require you to make either your entire blog private or the entire thing public. A great safety net to confound the pedophiles!

Comments have been more numerous since I started blogging on WordPress. I’m also getting comments by “new” people which tells me that it must be easier to use the comment feature than Spaces. I know some people were so frustrated by the comment problems on Spaces, they were posting comments to my entries on their own blogs or emailing me. I’m very glad this feature is easy to use. 

Vox

I tried to test out the new Vox by Six Apart, as suggested by Maryam Scoble, but they don’t let you sign up right away. They apparently don’t want new business. They said I would be notified when a space becomes available. What does that mean? Limited bandwith? They’re out of USB thumb drives to plug into the server? Is it like one of those elite social clubs where an old member has to die? I can already foresee problems. Personally, I think they were just trying to get my email address. Lucky for me, I used the one I give to potential spammers.

Update: An old blogger apparently died. It turned out that more than a week after requesting a blog (and after this article was complete), I finally received an invitation to join Vox. The original sign up had said that I would receive an email right away confirming my registration (it never came) and then I would be notified when space became available. This is NO WAY to do business. However, I decided to give it a try. I wouldn’t want to miss out on some cool, new, geeky thing, right? Plus, you can authoritatively rip on something after you’ve experienced it, much more easily than if you never got to try it. ;) Ok, I’m not biased, just annoyed, I’ll give it a fair try.

Interestingly enough, Vox has a huge variety of themes/ backgrounds. There isn’t a lot of flexibility as far as color selection, but there are a large variety of themes, second only to spaces. They also offer the ability to choose the space layout (sidebars right or left) and number of columns, with Spaces being the only other blog that allows you to choose those things independantly of the theme.

Photo mangement is achieved through Flickr and Photobucket and it is compatible with Typepad for cross posting. You can also add several media items like books, video and audio. Like Xanga, I was able to put a photo of one of my favorite books on my blog, but it doesn’t seem to pay for click-throughs from Amazon. I believe Spaces has this capability too because I’ve seen it on Maryam’s blog, but there is no income from click-throughs.

Due to the potential SPAM implications, I am very unhappy with one particular feature. It appears that your email displays in your profile and you do not get a choice about whether to display it or not, and whether or not you can write it out like dotcom to prevent the bots from getting it. I’ll know it’s you, Vox, when the spam starts rolling in!

Tags and organization seemed very straightfoward and easy to use in Vox. You can even organize photos, books and audio and video with tags. Other platforms require you to use Flickr to do that.

There are google ads across the bottom of my Vox blog, and as far as I can tell, it does not appear that the revenue is split or given to the individual blog owners (me). Another no-no in my book. As least I don’t have to look at a crusty toenail, though. The ads are much less intrusive across the bottom of the blog.

I found a cool little feature on Vox, called collections. Collections are defined as a convenient way to group together a set of other assets for a particular topic. For example, if you had traveled to San Francisco, you might want to make a collection of the travel books you read, the pictures you took, and the movie you watched about SF while you were there. You could also include an audio or video file that you took while you were out sightseeing. Using this feature, it does appear that you can create separate pages on Vox although I don’t think it’s quite the same as WordPress.

Much to my surprise, I did find Vox fairly simple to use. It looks like you can make individual entries viewable as private or by family and friends only, as opposed to public. I like the customization features and the interface. Since Vox is a fairly new platform, I imagine that the blog community is not well defined yet, nor is people’s perception of it. For my second choice, I would probably have a very tough time choosing between Xanga and Vox. I think I prefer the final look and feel of Vox more than Xanga and feel less “lost” trying to use it. The one huge drawback being no stats or referrals (as far as I could tell.) And I didn’t see a way to do a third party plug in, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. That means the non-technical would have to consult the technical.

Summary

So there you have it. A blog review for those of us regular people who don’t work in technology.

Here are the Blog Platforms ranked in order of preference:

Rank Blog Notes
1 WordPress Best of all worlds. Easy to use, great UI, most complete stats and referrals. Awesome features!
2 Vox Easy to use, difficult to sign up. Cool features, lots of flexibility.
3 Xanga Moderately easy to use. A few unique features, but not a lot of bells and whistles overall.  Lots of potential.
4 Spaces Easy to use, loads of problems. Assuming they’re ironed out, some good features, lots of flexibility.
5 Blogger Pretty stripped down. No bells and whistles; awkward to use. Ugly.
6 LiveJournal Difficult to use, hideously ugly, not a lot of bells and whistles. Looks like Las Vegas. Worst of all worlds.

I hope I have provided accurate evaluations of each platform for you. If I didn’t, it’s not my fault, it wasn’t obvious and therefore I will chalk it up to not being easy to use. ;D I realize that LiveJournal probably did not get as fair a shake as the others due to it not being user-friendly. More like user-hating. The price they must pay for a bad UI. I’m still very glad I ended up choosing WordPress as my platform and ever-so-grateful I never have to fight with Spaces again. Happy Blogging!

This post brought to you through Windows Live Writer. Live Writer works with many platforms including: Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress (and many others).

Helen Teixeira is a non-technical blogger in a very technical blogosphere. Her technology credentials include writing a good top ten on Geeks and being married to Steve Teixeira, Microsoft Group Program Manager for Visual C++. Centuries ago, in the dark ages, Helen was a High-Tech Marketing Communications Manager, but that was way back when ad agencies still did manual paste-ups.

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