Geeklog Forums

http://dave.britiany.com:8081/ I have just put it up. Hosting it at home over my DSL line for fun. I hope to build up a community of general PHP help around it. Stop by for a visit and ask a PHP question: http://dave.britiany.com:8081/

In preparation for building a blogger community out, I have done two things: 1) I signed up for a free account with blogger.com and blogspot.com - my site with them is: http://davidkoopman.blogspot.com/ 2) I have installed Geeklog (freeware weblog software) on my home machine http://dave.britiany.com:8081/ Blogger and Blogspot.com review: I see that blogger.com blogspot.com are the brother and sister. You can get a free website with blogspot.com (with ads). You use blogger.com to post your blogs. You need an account with both blogger.com and blogspot.com. If you want advanced blogging tools, you must upgrade your account for $35 per year (soon to be $50 per year) with blogger.com. Blogger.com provides the tools, not the website - you must have your own website, which can be with blogspot, if you like. If you want an add free website with blogspot, you must upgrade account: Blog*Spot Blog*Spot Ad-Free Blog*Spot Plus25 Blog*Spot Plus100 Space text only text only 25MB 100MB FTP Access No No Yes Yes Multiple blogs No No Yes Yes Ads? Yes NO ADS NO ADS NO ADS FREE bSTATS NO NO YES YES Transfer 250 MB 250 MB 1 GB 3 GB Setup Fee - $0 $5 $5 waived! Cost - $15 annually $5 a month $10 a month Specials - - $50 annually (save over 16%) $100 annually (save over 16%) I understand better now how they make money. They probably make more money with blogspot.com than they do with blogger.com. 2) I have installed Geeklog (freeware weblog software) on my home machine. My conclusion so far: Geeklog rocks! blogger.com sucks. Blogger.com is hard to use and after a couple hours of tinkering with it, I have not been able to get my site to do anything but post a one blog. The site design looks terrible and I have no desire to fill it with meaningless garble. They have a couple other templates, but they also look bad. Also, I am frustrated because I cannot post a second post to my blogspot site. I keep trying to post a second and it wants me to designate the site I want to post to. I tell it davidkoopman.blogspot.com and it tells me that name is already taken and to choose another! I know it's already taken, it's mine! Their software sucks. I must have gimped it. I will have to start over with a different name.... so I tried that davidkoopman2.blogspot.com - it's been 20 minutes and it's not ready to go yet. The whole thing just feels glitchy. I am pretty good at figuring this type of stuff out. Either I am an idiot or the people at blogger.com are making mistakes. Geeklog, on the other hand... I installed it on my home server yesterday. In a matter of about 2 hours, I put together an entire website that looks good and is easy to use. I feel like it actually has a purpose. I can ramble on about any subject I want: I chose PHP, and anybody can post comments to my garble. I can control the number of topics, the blocks, I can upload images, post events, take polls, add pages to my site, allow other users access to post topics, it's really magical. You can think of each section of geeklog as a seperate blog area. I can have as many sections as I choose. I control them. Also, geeklog is freeware and their is a pretty big community of developers making plugins, themes and hacks. I have not had time to play around with these plugins, themes or hacks yet, but even without them, this software is 100 times better than blogger.com. The sites show for themselves: Two hour of blogger.com tinkering: http://davidkoopman.blogspot.com/ Two hours of Geeklog.com tinkering: http://dave.britiany.com:8081/

Maybe you should write to Google and tell them what you think about their acquisition. They are pretty open to feedback.