What’s up with Blogger?
I can’t believe how many problem reports I’ve seen about Blogger just this week. Since I don’t usually tech Blogger, I did some reading up on the current problems and found a nice variety. Perhaps it was just that I was more alert to the issue, but now I seem to be seeing people having trouble with it everywhere. You get what you pay for, seems to be the general consensus. OK, so tell me again why people are using this?
The number 1 reason I’ve heard is, "I want to be found." I don’t believe this one to be valid, especially with some of the issues I’ve seen this week. How do people find your blog? Do they search for your name only on Blogger? Well, what about all of those folks on WordPress? They have followers. People who only use Twitter have followers. People who host their own blogs have followers. Really. I’ve run tests on this blog and found that the search engines pick up my new posts in about a day. With an RSS (subscription link) feed, it is easy for people to follow my posts. What’s easier to type and remember: deleyna.com or deleyna.blogspot.com?
The second reason is of course the cost. I have recommended Blogger as a good free option for some time. After this week, I’ll probably change the order of my recommendations for free blogs and put WordPress above Blogger. However, I’d like to see what someone could do with a Joomla site on GoDaddy’s free service. If someone wants to be a guinea pig for my test, I’ll give the first person to ask a free basic setup if you pay the $10 to register your domain name. While there are huge issues with free servers in general, I have seen GoDaddy behaving about as well as any of them. I’ve even seen people succeed in moving their domain off of the free server to a paid server without too much ugliness. (Note: I did NOT say without ANY ugliness.)
I have a thought. I make no efforts to hide that I love Joomla. It’s free. It’s powerful. It is community driven with thousands of add-ons, many of which are also free. I’ve also never hidden that I love my hosting company: BlueHost. For around $7/month they offer unlimited space, really reliable uptime, great servers AND they throw in the one domain name/year registration fee. Here’s something better: for only the cost of the additional domain name ($10/year) you can also put your friend’s blog on there with you. I have 7 sites currently running on my account. OH — and the best part? You ready for this? IF you have a problem, you call a phone number 24/7 and you get a real live person who speaks English…and they actually care.
Of course there’s some distance between free and $7/month. I’d like to take the hourly value of some of the folks I’ve seen fighting their blogs of late and see if that wouldn’t add up to a couple of BlueHost accounts. If two people worked together, that’d be $3.50/month. You can see how the cost would dissipate pretty quickly.
No, Joomla isn’t as easy to set up as Blogger. It isn’t hard, though. I’m going to put together some do-it-yourself steps and post them on this site. In the meantime, there are a number of good tutorials on the Internet. Or, yeah, you could always pay me to do it for you.
I love my Joomla blog.
