* Blog sites?

[RandyP]

I'm considering starting a genealogy blog, and I'm curious if anyone has any recent positive experiences with any blogging services in terms of reliability and speed.

I've used Wordpress.com in the past, but their use of a flash interface (which is so slowwwww) turned me off. Unless they've improved the speed, I'm reluctant to use them again.

I've heard some negative stuff about Livejournal that also makes me reluctant to use them, and I'm not sure if Blogger is any good, despite the widespread use of the service.

Any opinions, please?

Thanks.
Randy

ID:4317

[Jane]

I have my own Wordpress site, (for my photography) and I have never had any problems with speed. Other than photo uploading I don't think wordpress use flash for much in the admin area.

As long as your hosting has MySql and PHP support, wordpress is easy to set up and run.

[hsw]

I have a couple of Drupal blogging sites, one for my writing and one for genealogy. I like Drupal and you can host it anywhere with MySQL and PHP, but there's a steep learning curve that you might not want to get into.

LiveJournal definitely isn't what you want -- I also use it and love it for writing-related conversations, but it's more social networking than blogging.

[RandyP]

I don't believe I indicated I was hosting it myself, heh. I was looking for a blogging service, meaning, blogging site - I have little inclination to become a programmer or muck about with that kind of stuff (another reason why I hate doing custom queries, but that's another whole story).

Guess it's a tossup between blogger and wordpress. I'll have to poke around the Wordpress forums and see if their slowness problems have been resolved. (From what Jane reports, she doesn't have any problems, so maybe they've fixed that...)

[hsw]

I did say you might not want the learning curve!

I have an aversion to putting important content somewhere that I don't control and from which I might not be able to move easily, but everyone's mileage varies.

I have friends who are very happy with Blogger (although their requirements aren't too complicated); and friends (with more complex requirements) who are very happy with Wordpress. All of the serious Wordpress users I know host it themselves (with one exception, but his site gets serious traffic so he's a Wordpress.com VIP and that's a whole other ballgame.)

[RandyP]

I can certainly understand the aversion to putting important content somewhere that you lose control over. I've had that happen to me before in a different field.

The blog is not intended to put out information on family members that isn't out there already, but to focus on one segment of my tree - the Van Riper line, which I'm extremely attached to (thanks to my great-grandparents, who were VR's and absolutely super people). there's very little in the way of Van Ripers out in the blogsphere. Time to rectify that.

I guess the only solution is to give both blogger and wordpress trial runs with test blogs and find out which suits my needs.

Thanks for the advice, all. Much obliged!

[stbaldock]

I started for a brief period using Wordpress.com, many moons ago, but wanted more control, so I now have a 'self-host' Wordpress.
My domain host is Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com), who provide many options for your websites, using 'single-click installs', incl. Wordpress, Joomla, phpGedView.

Full control over MySQL databases, uses latest PHP etc...

All for the princely sum of $8.95 (but I think I started at $10.95?!)

I hunted for quite a while for value-for-money, feature-rich UK providers, but it seems that the US appear to be better at it!

[tjforsythe]

I have a couple of sites using Google Blogger. It takes about 5 minutes to setup and be running full steam. 10 minutes if you want to change some setting like themes. I spent a bit longer, but I'm picky. It is also really fast and have had no issues that I can think of.

You can see my ancestry blog at

http://ancestorsnow.blogspot.com/