Blogger beta

Today I decided to dust my blogger account. When I created it I was simply reviewing options...

At that time I found blogger very interesting but it lacked several options I needed, most of all:

• Restricting access to my postings (Actually it was possible - as blogger supported hosting blogs on other servers. If one happened to have access to www server and possibility there to restrict access, this would work.)
• Possibility to upload various files

After reviewing what was available I decided to host my own blog using serendipity (using my institutes web server ]:->). Actually I was mainly using it as logbook for my PhD. And after some time it became apparent that s9y was not the best option for the job.

• Uploading large files was a pain.
• Managing large collection of uploaded files was a pain.
• I got a lot of spam in the comments. And actually I didn't need comments... (turned them off altogether eventually)
  
• I found myself lacking time to play with vast features of s9y

So I did my research once again. And once again reviewed elog. This time I was convinced that it was the right tool. So I moved with my PhD logbook to it. After few moth I must admit it's great. It's very simple, not intrusive and lets me do my job quickly. Handles large attachments very well, has great permission control and it's very easy to create cross references.

There was no more point in keeping my personal blog on my institute server. So to gave myself a little breather from the work, I decided to check if I still remember my blogger login and password :-). Ideed I had :-D.

So after some playing with it I noticed a button that allowed me to upgrade to beta ]:-D. I pushed it without hesitation.

I must say that I hoped for a bit more changes. But it's great anyway. Possibility to restrict access to the whole blog is not as good as per post or per group settings but will be enough. If I'll need to restrict something I'll just create a new blog ;-). Though I wonder if there is possibility to display several blogger blogs on one page... Will have to check that one out someday...

There is of course dynamic posting. No more need to rebuild a whole blog to change one thing. Everything is now read from database in real time. Yay Google ;-)

Also new incarnation of templates editing is quite promising. I haven't noticed anything else worthwhile but surely I was not looking deep enough :-D.

I hope I'm here to stay, and I'll post something from time to time.