Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Alternatives To Blogger: LiveJournal

Over at the Alliance, we've been running a series of free blogging platforms that can serve as an alternative to Blogger.

"Why are we doing this?" you ask. Well, we've noticed lots of people complaining about issues with Blogger.

And here are some of the issues people have had with Blogger:

  • It's annoying to have to republish the entire blog for small edits

  • Not supporting categories

  • No built-in TrackBack support

  • Not offering extended entry functionality ("More..." or "Click to continue...")

  • Lack of variety in Templates or Template selection is limited

  • Unhappy with the general appearance of Templates

  • Fixed width Templates

  • 300-post limit on the edit page

  • No ability to moderate (as opposed to delete) comments

  • Inability to schedule posts for future publishing

  • Difficulty for beginners to edit the Templates

  • Service disruptions

  • "Second class blog" stigma / must have a "blogspot.com" URL

  • No window-esque, drop-and-drag interface to use when creating a blog


LiveJournal doesn't address all of these.

LiveJournal is a free platform offered by SixApart. In case you didn't know, SixApart is the company that owns the paid hosted platform TypePad and the blogging platform MovableType. LiveJournal wasn't started by SixApart, but was purchased by them in early 2005.

LiveJournal was designed to be a system for friends to keep in touch and keep up to date with each other. It's heavy into a "community" format.

LiveJournal doesn't address some of the issues we listed regarding Blogger. For example

  • No support for categories, although communities can, of course, be topic-based

  • No TrackBack support

  • Not offering extended entry functionality ("More..." or "Click to continue...")

  • Lack of variety in Templates or Template selection is limited

  • Inability to schedule posts for future publishing

  • Inability to edit the Templates

  • "Second class blog" stigma / must have a "livejournal.com" URL, allthough paid accounts can have their own domain name

  • No window-esque, drop-and-drag interface to use when creating a blog


As a full-featured blogging system, the free version of LiveJournal falls short. As a community of friends, LiveJournal works much better. As it should, since that why it was created to begin with.

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