Have a NACAF Summer

Blogging was meant to be easy. But the browser wars and MAC/PC compatibility issues will always get in the way.

So to some solutions.

For those of you who primarily use PCs then the best solution is Uniblogs. A quick simple set-up procedure will give you a fully functional Word Press blog with some easy editing tools that

• allow you to add links to your posts really easily
• allow you to create a blogroll set of links down the side bar without delving into the mysterious code
• best of all it allows you to create and set categories for your posts

You can also create extra pages on specific topics that are listed in your sidebar and that sit outside your reverse chronology blog listings. These are good for detailed pieces on a topic. See how I have added a page called Course Outline at the top of the sidebar.

For those of you who use Macs the solution is probably persevering with blogsome which will give you all the same functionality if you use Firefox as your browser. The only problem with blogsome is that, as we saw today, it is a very busy site and is often quite slow to load – this can be even worse if you are on dial-up.

If you are on a Mac and you find blogsome too slow you can stick with blogger – but as we saw today creating sidebar links can be a bit tricky and it does not offer the category function. Blogsource is similar to blogger – no categories but it gives you much easier sidebar links creation – only works in Firefox not Safari.

There is one other solution that some of you might want to explore. You can set up a blog in any of the free services and then you can post from your computer using a “desktop blogging client” such as ecto which allows you to manage everything outside your browser and avoid all the issues of what tools show up on what browsers. I am posting this using ecto, on a mac to a uniblogs site. However if I went to the control panel with a browser the links tool would not be working! It is not free but it’s pretty cheap and you can trial it for 14 days free. It also has a nifty tool that you can add to your browser toolbar which will allow you to post highlighted text to your blog directly from any browser with a simple click.

For those of you who think you might get serious about blogging it is worth checking out some of the paid services that offer a little more functionality. Typepad is probably the best and at the moment you can get 30 days free.

If you want to look at some blogs to get an idea of what blogging is all about check some of the bloggers that I have added to the sidebar links section