In the few months since Fictionaut’s release, a number of writers have described the service as a breath of fresh air. Some use it as a stage before publication – throw the drafts of your latest novel on Fictionaut, and you’re guaranteed a discerning audience. Most striking, however, is this love-letter by James Robinson, who says: “Fictionaut provides a round-the-clock, faithfully attentive audience. Bless its founders.” I saw that, thought for a bit, and emailed founder Jürgen Fauth for an invite.

Here are some thoughts, loosely connected, on Fictionaut.

Community

I’m must say that I’m most surprised at the level of community on the site. The majority of writing websites that I know have communities that aren’t particularly … nice. Fictionaut’s, however, not only seem to be consistently nice, but tend to also refrain from commenting on works they do not like. (If the writing is horrible, you keep quiet and go somewhere else). The net effect is that you feel – when you’re writing there – to be part of this welcoming, supportive group. And that’s a rather refreshing thing to have.

From experience, I’m not sure if such ‘supportive writer culture’ can or will last forever. The culture exists naturally, at the moment, bubbling up from the community, but if at any point Fictionaut opens its doors to the general public, the influx of new members may seriously undermine the tone and pitch of the site. And that’s something I pray won’t happen, though I’m not sure how they’re going to do it. Fictionaut will have to be very careful when they expand; my hope is that they’d get the formula just right.

(I suspect that the solutions for maintaining quality discussion would have to be technological at heart, the same way Paul Graham has programmed several clever things into Hacker News, in order to maintain intelligent discourse. But how exactly this applies to writing I’m not particularly sure.)

Readability baked right in

Fictionaut forces its writers to publish stories according to a standardized, highly readable format. I posted a short story on the site and came away impressed with the quality of the user experience. Reader comments are placed in the sidebar, there’s a section for author notes, and the element placement leads me to suspect that everything you see on-site is deliberately designed to be that way.

There are little flourishes, too, like the beautiful popups that appear when you add someone as a friend, or when you’ve had a failed login:

I realize I’m a being a bit of a design geek here, but it’s hard to miss: someone has spent a lot of time making sure everything works intuitively on Fictionaut. I applaud his (or her) attention to detail.

Superb writing

Writing is good on Fictionaut. I sometimes spend hours on the site, reading newer, cooler, better stories – and I can say with some confidence that there’s a high standard to which most Fictionaut writers adhere to. At the very least, there’s a base level of competence that you don’t usually find anywhere else.

A large chunk of the site’s stories are flash fiction, followed by poetry, short stories, and a sprinkling of books-in-progress, posted chapter-by-chapter.

I should note that this quality didn’t happen by accident. Fictionaut’s founder, Jürgen Fauth, has a PhD in English/Creative Writing from USM’s Centre for Writers. The core community of the site was handpicked, I think – and new memberships are still dependent on invitations. Accordingly, the site currently leans towards literary fiction, and it feels – at times – like a literary magazine.

At the moment you either get in on invitation, or you apply for an invite. The application page leads me to suspect that Fictionaut enforces a filter for writers – you’ll either have to be competent enough, or established enough to get in (or you’ll have to know someone who’s already in, I suppose). This sounds scary and slightly elitist, but it probably explains the quality of the community and writing on the site today.

There’s a paragraph in the Venuszine Fictionaut review that says:

Pia Erhardt, a seasoned writer from New Orleans who recently had the “most favorited” story, “Ambulance,” agrees that it’s sometimes “terrifying” to post her unedited work, mostly because she respects what her fellow members are writing.

Quality begets quality, and so – again – I’m not particularly sure how they’re going to maintain this without the current invitation system.

(My favourite story on Fictionaut so far is Gold, by Ethel Rohan. To be fair, though, all her stories are just as good.)

Closing Thoughts

Fictionaut’s a little like an oasis, at the moment: it’s quite rare to find a such a large community of good writers online – even at its current size – who’re so supportive of each other. Despite my doubts with Fictionaut’s scalability, I must add that writing and reading on the site has been one of the more enjoyable things I’ve done, lately.

And so – while I’m not sure if Fictionaut can keep it up, or even where they’re headed, I really am quite grateful for the site, for what they’re currently doing for writers. I merely hope that Fictionaut ages gracefully, without the worst of teething problems that so often follows a growing – and social – community. I wish Fictionaut well.

A Recap

Novelr’s been around for some time now, and in that time we’ve learnt quite a few things together. Let’s start off with a couple of things that we do know about presenting online fiction. Peel off that scalp and think back: what have we learnt together, exactly?

One of the first things we’ve got to remember is that reading online is crucially divided into two distinct stages. These stages exist in the offline, paper-book world as well, but they’re not as critical for the writer as they are on the Internet. The first stage is called the browsing stage. During this stage a potential reader skims content to determine if the work is worth reading or no. It isn’t just the opening text that the reader takes into account – in the browsing stage, it is everything from the subject matter to the included pictures to the size of the font to the weight of the book in the hands that goes into a reader’s evaluation. If the reader thinks the text is promising, he or she then moves into the second stage, the reading stage. You and I should know this – if you are a book lover, like I am, then you will recognize this stage as the one where you forget about the sun and the ocean and so get sunburnt with a shadow-image of a book burnt into your chest. The reading stage calls for complete attention on the text. Everything else – links, ads, sidebar text – are superfluous to the reading experience, and they fall to the periphery of a reader’s vision.

The second thing on presenting online fiction that we must remember is what I call the Picture Book Effect: credibility and perception of online content is shaped by the design/format in which that content is presented. In simpler terms: your readers judge your work by the visual cues you have on your site. There are deliberate differences between the New York Times and a celebrity gossip blog. Both appeal to different demographics, and so both have different visual cues. One is designed to be credible, the other is designed to be kinky. One is black and white, the other shocking pink. How readers view your site depends as much on the design of said site as it does on the text you have provided them with.

The third thing that we must recall are the basic principles of readable design. Large fonts, good contrast, clear colours. An intuitive site structure. What exactly these elements are and how you apply them is beyond the scope of this article – go read some of the previous Novelr posts on the topic, or pay a visit to the pros.

So what have we learnt? We have learnt that an ideal fiction format is designed around a browsing stage and a reading stage. We have learnt that the site must have a coherent visual identity, one that should – ideally, at least – complement the fiction. And thirdly, lastly, we have learnt that the site must be readable.

The Online Fiction Format

So what should an online fiction format look like? What elements should we include with it? In this we are faced with a complex task, and so it would be helpful to begin first by talking about what we wouldn’t need to include with the online fiction format.

The first thing we have no need to include is forcefully-readable text. This is simply pragmatic: it makes no sense to limit authors to one font over another, or to ban them from using font sizes below a certain cutoff-point. Neither can we stop writers from using electric pink or neon green in their prose. Most of us already know how to display our fiction in a readable manner. The ones who don’t will quickly learn from the lack of happy readers.

We don’t have to create distinct visual identities for each work. We also don’t have to adjust for all possible forms of presentation. Some writers will want innovative, highly experimental forms in which to present their fiction; this format does not serve them. It simple cannot: no format will attract or hold the interest of such mavericks for very long. This particular format will be for the majority of authors out there: the ones who want to write and who do not wish to worry too much about the underlying mechanics of code and presentation.

And so what should this format be like? At its most basic level, it should have two things:

• It should be built to accommodate the two states: browsing and reading
• It should be easy to customize, both visually and practically

We shall deal with these two elements in order.

The Reader Conversion

We have learnt earlier that there are two states for the online reader: the browsing stage and the reading stage. How can a presentation style be built around these two reading patterns? The answer is simple, but consists of two parts: we would need, first of all, to build two distinct screens for the prospective reader, that is consistent throughout the entire work/format. Secondly, those two screens would need to fulfill all that the reader would want in both stages of the reading process. I’m not going to say that this is dead easy (the second part, in particular, isn’t), but the base idea isn’t particularly complicated: at the browsing stage, give the reader a splash page. At the reading stage, give the reader text. Got that? Good. Now a little more detail:

The Browsing Stage

At the browsing stage, give the reader enough scannable information to make the decision to leave or to read. This sounds simple, but it isn’t: what you’re really trying to do is to convince the reader to choose the latter and not the former. There is a limit to this, of course – if your fiction is about vampire rabbits, and I am not interested in vampire rabbits, then there is very little you can do to make me choose to read your work. The trick is to get the readers that are open to vampire rabbit stories to make the conversion from browse to read.

I have no time to analyse the elements of a good, compelling splash page here in this article. I suspect that it would involve a fair deal of experimentation on my part, and a fair bit of patience on yours. But my case is that an online fiction format should provide writers with the tools to make a splashpage (and not just an about page) and that the splashpage should allow easy placement of a blurb, some links (latest chapter/first chapter etc), and some choice words from a selection of positive-ish reviews. For your perusal, some of the best I have seen so far:

Winter Rain, by Chris Poirier (yes, that same god behind Web Fiction Guide)

A Timely Raven by Amber Simmons

Beasts of New York by Jon Evans

Getting Real by 37signals

… and Speak Human by Eric Karjaluoto.

This last one isn’t actually a splashpage for an existing book, but a promo site for a pre-release non-fiction title. I’m including it to make a point that the online fiction format should be able to have writers adapt their splashpage from site-intro to preview, and that this may work, too, regardless of whether it is fiction or non-fiction the format needs to handle.

The Reading Stage

And so that covers the browse stage. For the read stage, however, the online fiction format should be crafted so as to limit distractions from the reading experience. This is a complete opposite to the browse stage’s objective of providing as much scannable information as possible. In the read stage, you want to remove as many scannable elements as you can, for this detracts from the readers’ concentration on the prose.  What this means, practically, is a limitation on the number of sidebars possible. No sidebar is good, one sidebar is the maximum allowed. (I’m tempted to make exceptions for thrillers and David Wellington, but then again this is a fiction format and it has to be general and simple all through. Sigh.) MCM’s novels have the read stage screens perfected (image below), and so have 37signals with their book Getting Real (here’s an example of a chapter).

The basic rules for a good read stage screen is this: navigation before the text, stuff after the text, no distractions in-between. Things like exhortations to donate or to buy the book may be included after the end of the chapter, at the bottom of the page, or you may choose to place those pages on a separate screen at the very end of the novel. That’s up to you. A basic fiction format should, at least – I believe, have this underlying structure.

Flexibility And The Fiction Format

Now that we’ve dealt with the browse/read design philosophy, let us turn to the idea that the online fiction format should be easy to customize, both visually and practically.

When I say visually, I mean that the design must be simple enough to allow all kinds of writers to use it and adapt it for their own, distinct, purposes. This is not easy to achieve, for it takes a certain amount of ability as a designer to create themes that are universally applicable. The only example I can think of, at the moment, is the Minima theme of the Blogger platform, originally designed by Douglas Bowman in 2004. It is used by hundreds of blogs worldwide: all similar, yet never the same.

When I say that the format should be easy to customize practically, I mean that whatever format it is should be easy for any writer to turn into their own. Minima’s beauty is that it can be completely changed by just adding an image header and a background image to whatever blog it is that you have. The online fiction format should have this ability, too. I am not yet a good programmer, but I believe that it is possible to integrate this functionality to the backend of the fiction format theme/system: optional fields to upload and modify the header/background image of the site you’re using it on.

Conclusion

If you’ve been following closely, you’ll realize that any and all of these elements can be applied to the existing content platforms of the web. It is true that the suggestions I have offered here can simply be implemented with a theme; in fact, if I felt like it I really could go out right now to whip one up for the Blogger platform. But this is merely one aspect of the online fiction format, and there have been countless other suggestions besides. MCM has already suggested e-commerce integration, Jim Zoetewey suggests built-in ebook conversion ability (such as a one-click conversion of chapters into PDFs or ePub files). There’s no reason all these and more can’t be integrated into the online fiction format; in fact, some of us have already taken the first few steps in these particular directions. These are my suggestions, I’m sure you have many more. Over to you.

Over the weekend, there was a lot of uproar about a worm attack on WordPress installations that wrecked some notable blogs. Amid the sometimes-smug observations by the unaffected, I found one point that needs to be elevated to basic principle:

Most people shouldn’t be running their own blogging software.

When I last blogged about the security issue, I asked two questions: 1) what are the odds? and 2) should we be thinking about switching platforms? These two questions resulted in a number of replies – in Novelr’s comments, via Twitter; via email. But my 2nd question wasn’t what some of you thought it to be. I was asking, rather, if we should be thinking about building yet another CMS, when WordPress itself -  a remarkably polished project, I must say – was compromised by a worm attack.

I’ll be posting a summary of the few features we’ve discussed soon, and hopefully also a couple of mockups of what a good fiction format should look like (my copy of Photoshop doesn’t seem to like Snow Leopard very much). But while the need and the feature set for a format is clear, the how-tos and the implementation is still far from obvious. Till they are, however, I’d like to know your thoughts on this security issue – how safe do you feel on WordPress? Would you consider switching? Or should you prefer a hosted service, like August suggests?

Blooks come in many shapes and sizes. They are presented in different fonts, with different site designs, and on different blogging platforms. There are as different and as unconnected to each other as one novel is connected to another – there may be some inter textual references, but most of the time they are unique standalone works, beautiful and solitary in birth.

Above all they are websites. Like all websites, blooks are subjected to a 3 second window of opportunity where the user gets his first impressions, and then either moves on, or stays.

Here’s a simple question: have you ever judged a website in 3 seconds? A first impression that shaped what you thought of the site forever?

Yes, you have. If not consciously, then you did so unconsciously. You aren’t likely to read anything from a website with a shocking pink background. And if you do, you’d be cursing the designer every moment you’re there.

Let’s take it a step further:

Does the blog platform on which the blog was published affects your judgment of the overall quality of the blog? No? Yes? For a little while?

Interesting, isn’t it?

I’ve been about the blogosphere for quite awhile, and there are a few things about it that perplex me. This is one of them: why are Blogger blogs less respected than WordPress and Movable Type ones? It is an unexplained bias, and I find even myself judging the blog by what platform it is on. Blogger? Cheap. WordPress? Ahh! Some decency. Movable Type? Professional. Custom platform? Wow!

It might possibly be just me, but run a search for the keywords ‘I hate Blogger‘ and compare that to ‘I hate WordPress‘. The results for the former are in the hundreds; whereas legitimate thrashings of WordPress are confined to the first 6 results (as of today, that is).

There are a few reasons, I’m sure. The Internet community at large loves open sourced products, and will happily bless WordPress and defend it despite its faults. WordPress is the Apple of the Internet’s eye. Blogger is cheap, free, not as flexible or powerful, plus it is home to over a million blogs – most of them personal journals. Before Google took action Blogger was also littered with hundreds of splogs (spam blogs – you know, the ones filled with links to viagra sites … ).

Blogger may also be less respected in the eyes of the Internet community because so few ‘professional‘, ‘A-list‘ blogs are on Blogger. Boing Boing is run on Movable Type; Techcrunch on WordPress. Thus there is a subconscious connection between these platforms and quality, however unsubstantiated that may be. It helps, you see, that you can easily tell MT and WordPress from Blogger blogs – the layout elements and the presentation styles are quite different. Blogger blogs can be tweaked to look like MT and WordPress blogs, but few do so.

So what’s my point? My point is that beware thou of these preconceptions as you pick your blogging platform. It’s quite a moot point, really, since serious bloggers eventually move off Blogger (Typepad, for some reason, is still respected) and onto other more ‘respectable’ blog platforms. But I’m mentioning this bias here because a lot of us blookers use Blogger blogs to drive publish our work on. Readers, in that 3 second first impression, construct in their minds a distorted picture of the quality of your blog just by the platform. Mask it with a theme, and for God’s sake don’t leave it on Minima.

I believe the quality of the blog will eventually seep through and overcome whatever distorted view Internet users have, but this is the jungle Internet. And sometimes, in 3 seconds, the animals readers are not so kind.

Nothing groundbreaking here, just a small observation. And an interesting one at that. Is it only me, or do other people subconsciously gauge the quality of a blog by its platform? Over to you.

Blogger: -Pros: Flexibility, a good amount of theme control, ease of use. Cons: Bad reliability at times, as well as less than satisfactory speeds. Recommended for blooking, or posting a book in blog form.

WordPress.com: – Pros: Complete feature set, good looking themes, active development, good support. Cons: Severe limitations – almost no customization (can customize CSS if you pay). Stay away, unless they allow you a greater say in your blog’s theme.

WordPress.org: – Pros: Robust, stable, in active development, comes with complete support base, open source, free, the list goe on and on. Cons: Steep learning curve for non web professionals who want to customize their blogs, needs own server. The perfect solution for writing a blook because almost anything can be done with WordPress.

Blogsome: – Pros: Flexible, WordPress features, ease of use with theme customization, hassle-free plugins. Cons: Reliability, no ability to use own domain name. An okay choice, but the inability to use your own domain name (short of using a redirect, which is a waste of time) should detract you from it.

Terapad: – Pros: One stop location for everything you need in a blog, good cuztomization options. Cons: Interface can be improved – not very easy to use for the first timer, only four themes. Terapad is a wild card – still very new, but promising. Only time will tell as to how it all shapes up.

And, last, but not least:

Vox: – Pros: Ease of use trumps all other 5 selections, huge selection of themes, seamless integration with third party web apps. Cons: Social orientated, so not suitable for blog promotion, no commenting for non Vox users, no theme customization. Use this only if you don’t even know what a blog is. Great for beginners, or for creating fictional blogs of fictional characters. Otherwise, stay away.

And this is the conclusion of the series! Should you ever wish to blog your book, take a stroll through these reviews – I do hope something in there will be helpful to ensure choosing the right blogging platform sets you off to a head start in blooking.

When Vox was first released by Six Apart it was touted as the social blogging experience. Made for personal blogging, Vox is a cross between a blogging platform and a social network, which can easily be seen in what is called ‘Neighbourhoods’ – a collection of friends, family and other blogs that you read and maintain relationships with. While this doesn’t seem like a proper platform on which to write a book, i chose to review Vox mainly because of its attractions to the everyday user – something an author who is more used to paper and pen might appreciate.

Ease Of Use

Of the other 5 blogging platforms reviewed, none comes close to Vox in successfully integrating text, pictures, audio and video in a single, beautiful posting interface. It’s terribly easy to fall in love with posting in Vox – there even is a question of the day that appears everyday in your dashboard, setting off that spark of creativity whenever you feel lethargic and loath to cook up a post. But is this any good for writing a book online?

Well, Vox makes blogging understandable – even your grandmother can post pictures and videos and bring it all together on an good looking blog. Working with the assumption that the average author knows basic word processing skills, Vox can and will be able to accomodate a blook and make it easy for anyone – even if you’ve never heard of a blog – to post up chapters.

Looks

Vox has a whole plethora of themes, most of them beautiful, jaw dropping, but with limited cuztomization. The most they allow you to do is to upload your own header picture and determine the sidebar positions, but while this may seem harsh, the sheer amount of quality themes they provide more than make up for this. Vox themes allow you to select 3 collumn and 2 collumn variations, as well as sidebar elements and postitioning, thus making sure Vox blogs not only look good, they look different.

There’s not much else to be said about Vox’s looks, other than it looks extremely polished and well thought out, from the homepage to your posting screen to even the ads that pepper the service (they blend in with the background). It’s is free and its themes are click aplenty. End.

Features

Vox has RSS2 feeds (what self respecting platform doesn’t?), tag organization, easy importing from other blogging platforms, as well as sections to integrate your Flickr, Youtube, Amazon and Photobucket with your blog. I particularly like the Book button on your posting page – it allows you to link up with Amazon to show the latest books you’re reading, and even keep a ‘bookshelf’ in your sidebar displaying your recent reads. Audio clips can also be uploaded, allowing you to serenade your readers with your chapters read aloud, nevermind that they don’t understand you. ;-)

Vox also has something called Voxwatch, as well as a few other features that are better suited with the social blogging theme: Voxwatch compiles feeds from other Vox blogs into one location in your dashboard, allowing you easy access to posts from your friends or people in your ‘neighbourhood’.

While the lack of categories may be a trifle stiffling, Vox’s major limitation is that ‘blogrolling’ (they call it your neighbourhood – didn’t i mention this service is social orientated?) and comments are limited to Vox users. This doesn’t encourage commenting, though it depends on what kind of a project you are treating your book as. It might be static, allowing you no creative feedback, which suits Vox perfectly – only your friends and people you want to meet in Vox can comment. But if you want to promote your blook online, in your blog, then i suppose this limitation strictly hampers the connection and interactivity you can otherwise provide to your readers.

Support

Vox has a very efficient ‘knowledge base’, or help section. You start by running a search over a multitude of help topics, ranging from feeds to posts to even the ads provided on the service. Everything is sorted by category and the dates each article was last updated is displayed – making finding info and learning about the service a real breeze. I enjoyed researching topics while writing this post – while i was a Vox beta tester, i didn’t really make use of much of the functions Vox had to offer, since most of my social contacts didn’t operate in Vox.

Reliability

I haven’t heard of any complaints about Vox so far – not even downtime … which means that if they do have lights out it doesn’t happen very often. Which is marvelous. Six Apart, the company behind Vox, is pretty experienced with blogging platforms – they are the guys behind Typepad and Movable Type, which is a credible alternative to WordPress, though it isn’t free. I’ll trust my blog with them, how about you?

Conclusion

Vox may not be recommended for writing a blook on – or any other story, for that matter – but what it does is to provide a pain-free transfer from the offline world to the online one. Not everyone understands blogs – there are so many preconceptions about this new form of media, so Vox is still the platform i’d recommend to any newbie – simply because it’s so darned easy to use and understand. The only other use? Character blogs, for your story – with neighbourhoods, voice clips and elegant themes.

Read the summary for this series!

Terapad is a fairly new member to the blogging world. Apparently their creators took a look at what was available out there, saw that there were all these disparate functions on blogs, and then decided to bring it all together in one nice package, free of charge, but ad supported.

Ease Of Use

Terapad is above average in ease of use. You sense that they absolutely refuse to allow you to touch code, giving you little blanks for sidebar categories to paste your sidebar elements in, and allow seamless integration with third party services like Meebo and Google Analytics. It may take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with where the shiny ‘new post’ button is, but once you do it works slick and fast and easy.

The dashboard for Terapad is tabbed, and cleanly labelled, and each of these tabs when clicked shows you the options page, with a short explanation for what all the elements on page are about at the top. I’d have preferred it if there were little pop-ups telling me what the various options did, but all I got were non-informative little icons.

When it comes to handling text and the written word however, Terapad works brilliantly with no complaints on my part. It has a good editor, plenty of functions, and an easy to understand file system for organizing your pages and/or posts.

Looks

Terapad looks extremely polished. There are only 4 themes at the moment (unfortunately), and you can only touch the CSS for these themes, but everything from the ‘front-end’ to the ‘back-end’ looks beautiful. The Mac icons on each of the menu pages scream OSX, but at the very least it’s plagiarisism that oozes cool.

As for the blogs themselves I’ve yet to see anything jaw dropping, as most of the ‘top 10 sites’ all use one of the four themes (yawn). But a look at the style sheets behind each of these blogs told me that there’s quite a degree of custiomization available to the end user, and as time goes by I’m sure we’ll start seeing good, unique looking blogs powered by Terapad.

Features

Terapad comes bundled with its own stat service, as well as forums, a store, a careers page, an events page and an image gallery. When you actually think about it, all of these tabs can be used by authors, with the possible exception of the careers page. The blog section will be for the blook, the events section can be used for book tours and readings, forums are just another way of reaching out to the reader, and the store can be used for eBook selling and/or blatant self promotion.

In other areas, Terapad provides RSS2.0, categories managed through the control panel, as well as an upload section. Unfortunately it only provides four themes at the moment, and you can only edit the style sheets, not the theme files itself. This isn’t a particular loss, since so much of the actual theme is open to editing through the control panel.

Terapad makes money with adsense in your sidebar. It isn’t that unsightly, but I’d have prefferred it if they chose an adsense template that blended in with the theme. You can, however, pay $5 a month to remove these ads and up site bandwidth from 20 gigabytes a month to 40 gigabytes per month.

Support

Terapad is pretty ‘happening’, nevermind the implications of the word. Features are being added on as of press time (something to do with Widgets, which I can’t wait to try out), and there’s a new community page that has that new car webpage smell about it. It’s cool, it’s pretty, and even though there’s no huge archive of help files (think WordPress codex) it looks set to stay. Site developers seem on top of what users have to say about it, so at the moment I’ll say that support for Terapad (which is small, anyway) is top notch. We’ll have to wait for active forums, though to see how good the support for such a platform is. But all in due time.

Reliability

Reliability is a big blank: Terapad is very new, and it’s too early to say anything on how well the platform holds up. All the features I tried out worked though, and I must say what they plan to do with it is a one stop blogging service that does ‘everything you’d like your personal blog or corporate site to do, and does it a lot better than your current solution – all free of charge.’

Which is clear vision. Mostly.

Conclusion

Terapad is this as-yet untested Blogging platform that looks exciting, and is flexible enough to accomodate all your blooking needs – be it for promotion or as the location for your next book, online. The only things to watch out for is its reliability, which we’d surely see over time as Terapad establishes itself.

Read the last in the series: Vox reviewed!

This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform – For Authors‘ series started six days ago. From the more common wordpress platforms, we’re now going to look at Blogsome – also a free WordPress Multi User service, but with major differences. Let’s see how good it is for writing a blook.

Blogsome has been around for quite some time, and the age of the service shows the instant you log in – Blogsome is using an extremely dated version of WordPress MU (multi user edition, as they say so themselves). In contrast to the current versions of WordPress, Blogsome’s user interface is grey, and not as attractive, as we’ll see for ourselves soon enough.

Ease of Use

Blogsome’s option organization is pretty clear cut from the outset, and fairly easy to understand for anyone who’s ever touched a blogging platform. It may be ugly but it’s clean and ugly (wow, talk about a new term for web design), and it gets the job done . There is absolutely no fuss since you don’t upload plugins or themes (more on this particular point later) and the visual editor bundled (with an activated plugin) is barebones and pretty much keeps everything you wish to use a click away. It’s impossible to get confused working on Blogsome, and that’s a very good thing.

Another thing about Blogsome is that there is absolutely no risk of something funny happening with the code, especially when installing plugins. A whole list is right there, waiting for you to activate them one by one – which is a very straightfoward process. Theme selection is based on one page, and the great thing about it is that not a line of PHP is seen anywhere throughout the platform. Good news for beginners, indeed.

Looks

As mentioned before, Blogsome uses an early version of WordPress, which means the user interface is not quite as pretty as the current blue, saliva inducing one. The themes however, do not lack. Blogsome uses a collection of 4 files to create a theme – one for the main page, one style sheet (css, obviously), one for posts and one for comments. This function is marginally better than Blogger’s and allows for greater theme control on a WordPress platform. Which can only be good, since you have trackback and the little bells and whistles only to be expected from WP.

Blogsome uses xhtml. It’s easier to understand, easier to use and flexible enough to allow for good looking themes. And since the only code you’ll handle on this platform is xhtml, authors can spend more time concentrating on the story and the plot, minimizing the time needed to bring their work online. Some may argue that you don’t truly have total theme control, but what it allows for is enough freedom for you to choose how your blog should look like.

Features

Blogsome provides pretty much all the essentials needed for blogging: RSS2, expanded functionality with plugins, trackback, and categories. But Blogsome unfortunately isn’t as robust as WordPress is. What you see is what you get – the plugin list can’t be added to, the theme list stay as it is (though it must be noted you can easily create your own) and the general impression you get as you go about blogging on it is that it doesn’t change at all – unlike the spirit of constant experimentation you find at WordPress.com. Yes, you do occasionally get the new plugin – but much of what happens isn’t worth writing a press release about.

I’m not sure if it’s possible for Blogsome blogs to have their own domain name – for the most part Blogsome blogs look good, are readable, and provide a good foundation to start blooking on – nothing more, nothing less. It is a tool where it is more of a commidity than a novelty.

Support

Blogsome has its own user forums, where issues regarding the platform are helpfully addressed. The FAQ section particularly is a very well maintained place, with helpful moderators and clear, concise messages explaining the various points of the blogging platfrom to users. I particularly like the How Blogsome Is Different From WordPress post, where everything a curious user (read:me) needs to know is clearly spelt out.

Reliability

Blogsome is average in reliabilty. Plugins are guaranteed not to clash with each other, but there have been issues with categories and feeds before, and a quick look at the forums show us that Blogsome isn’t bug free (it is, after all, running an alpha version of WordPress MU). But while these issues are clearly worked upon by administrators and Blogsome staff, their TOS tells you that they are not responsible in any way if one of their databases containing your blook hits an ice berg and sinks, never to be found again.

We do recommend that you keep backup copies of any information of value to you that you post on blogsome.com. While we currently do keep backups (as of Feb ’05) and have performed re-installs of blogs at no cost, however because we are not charging bloggers at the moment in order to limit our liability we retain our right to discontinue providing the blog hosting service at any time at our sole discretion (whether due to systems failure or not), or any other sevices, with or without notice.

Conclusion

Blogsome is barebones blogging at its best. An easily customizeable theme structure with good WordPress functionality empowering your publishing can’t go wrong. Albeit its ugliness behind the scenes, Blogsome is a good choice to blook with. And as long as you keep backups of all your chapters offline, you’ll be able to easily export posts to other WordPress platforms, should you decide to move at a later date.

Read the next in the series: Terapad reviewed!

The downloadable WordPress platform is the Firefox of bloggers – free, open source, reliable and powerful. The question is this: is it too daunting for the average author to use?

Ease of Use

WordPress.org is very big on ease of use. Captions like ‘Our famed five minute install’ and its whimsical software upgrade pages poke fun at what they know to be a good user experience.

But while the application insists on its ease-of-use all through downloading, uploading, installing and then customizing, my personal experience two years ago with the platform, as ‘an average user of the internet (who understood basic HTML)’ deviated from the normal ’5 minute install’, mainly because I used a dicky zip program, didn’t know what FTP was, and uploaded everything into the wrong directory. All in all it took me 2 hours to get everything up and running on my server. Not a good start for such a famed blogging platform, I thought then.

Hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere, don’t we?

But i’m getting slightly ahead of myself in this review. Allow me to explain roughly of what consists of a WordPress installation.

First off, you download the package from WordPress.org. It contains a collection of files, mostly PHP, that make up the platform. You open up one file and edit a few lines.

Next, you get your hands on an FTP client (Filezilla is recommended) and then upload the hundred-plus files to a MySQL server. It must be noted that good, free and reliable hosts with PHP are very hard to find (in a year’s worth of searching for a friend the best i could come up with was F2O), but WordPress.org has a list of good hosts that you have to pay for.

Last of all you go through a breezy setup process that clearly shows why WordPress is so loved – smooth and easy, tongue in cheek.

WordPress sounds daunting, but for a platform as powerful as it is the setup and day-to-day running is well designed enough for almost anybody to use. Added features (through plugins) and themes are installed simply by uploading and activating (one click only). It’s top of the line where blogging is concerned, but if you ever intend to edit a theme or write a plugin with no knowledge of PHP, things get tough very fast.

Looks

I’ve already written about how good WordPress looks in my WordPress.com review, and everything is equally good, if not better with the downloaded version. Themes are created by a huge community of users, some good, others ugly not to my taste. The great thing about WordPress is that almost anything is possible in theme designing – Ajax, easy integration with Flickr, Flash, and it’s all done on a platform that’s dedicated to producing standards complaint code. If you don’t understand what that means just buzz it out and understand that it’s good, all good.

Again, the only issue with all of this that I can think of is the steep learning curve associated with modifying WordPress themes. While CSS may not be very difficult to learn (and what i’m saying here is that PHP is, kinda) most authors on the street out there simply don’t have the time to learn how everything works and customize everything to their liking. But i guess there’s no way around this issue – Mark Jaquith recently wrote about how the tools we use to project ourselves and our work online still do matter, and that we’ll eventually reach a stage where the engine powering personal publising online (a blook, for instance) doesn’t, but till then you and I will have to deal with code.

Features

WordPress is way up there, feature-wise. It has everything you’ll ever need – and if it doesn’t you can just pop in a plugin to provide the features you want.

Google sitemaps? Checked. Blog backups? Checked. Tags? Checked. Integration with *insert web service here*? Checked. The list goes on and on. But even without plugin functionality WordPress packs a punch. Categories, trackback, pingback, and individual RSS feeds for comments, categories and posts are all available, more than enough for any blook. This raises the question: is it all necessary for blooking? I personally don’t think so, but then again I’m sure there are people out there who don’t mind such a feature rich package.

Support

WordPress users have a good support forum and amazing documentation to boot. Any bugs and problems are usually dealt with quickly, and newbies can quickly catch up on how it all works by reading one of the many fine articles in the codex, that cover almost everything about the platform.

Reliability

Sure, WordPress has its fair share of bugs and vulnerabilities, meaning there are cases of hackers threatening you with a blog takeover (why does that sound so funny?), but WordPress is open sourced, and a look at the WordPress trac shows that work is still progressing on the platform as we speak.

Updates to address bugs are rolled out so fast I barely had gotten used to installing and running WP2.1 when WP2.1.1 came out. And then I found out that WP2.2 is expected in 4 months. Wow.

Conclusion

This review has been positive right from the start. WordPress is easy to use, feature-rich, reliably and has great support. it’s clearly the best platform to blook with, but there are a few drawbacks. Customizing it is difficult if you don’t have the skills to do so, and you’re guaranteed to have to at least buy your own server or hosting plan to install the software.

Other than that, WordPress is perfect. Just be patient with learning how to code in it – i hear the learning curve is steep and i’m still at it.

Overall? Freshies beware. Others hop on.

Read the next in the series: Blogsome reviewed!

The popular Scobleizer blog (in the Technorati top 100 blogs list) is hosted on the WordPress.com platform (quite different from WordPress.org, which you have to download and install yourself). While it looks customized, don’t be fooled – WordPress.com is not quite the lovely maiden it seems.

Ease of Use

WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging platforms out there, and it is a daunting task for the average internet user to mod and customize it. The good news is this: WordPress.com makes it easy enough for anybody to blog using WordPress, and look good while doing it. The bad news? It rips out a lot of the features that make WordPress so cool.

But back to its ease of use. WordPress.com seems polished and beautiful – posting is clean and easy (not to mention Ajaxy) and everything is distilled to checkboxes and menus. Want to add a link? No need to write a whole list of <li> tags – just go to the blogroll section in the interface and fill in the necessary blanks.

The way WordPress.com goes out of its way to ease things for you almost makes you feel pampered. Big fonts and even bigger buttons are everywhere, wrapped with a beautiful blue colour scheme. Feed subscribers and site visitors are seamlessly integrated with a Flash (or was it Ajax?) display panel. Quite simply, the platform treats you like an idiot. Very nicely, if I may add.

Looks

WordPress.com looks great. All the themes available are well selected – nice lines and readable fonts. Behind the scenes the platform looks just as good, if not better – the navigation bar at the top uncluttered and clearly defined. Any average Joe can really enjoy himself writing, but there’s a major problem.

You can’t edit or create or upload your own themes.

Wait! Let me elaborate before you start bombing me with comment spam – I’ve been waiting and waiting for them to release that particular feature, but weeks had dragged into months before any change was made. And, Oh! What a change it was! You need to pay to edit yuor themes – and even then only the css style sheets! If you’re sticking to free, WordPress.com has added features that might attract you – such as the fact that all their themes are widgetised now, and there are a wider selection of quality templates which i’m sure will grow over time.

But, for the rest of the WordPress.com world (read: the users of the free accounts) is by and large based on the same themes, and no matter how good looking each of them are it’ll be hard top stand out on such a platform.

Features

WordPress.com covers the basics quite well. There’s RSS2, trackbacks, categories, comments, simple blogrolling, an integrated traffic and feed counter, and the ability to create blog pages (in contrast to Blogger’s service). There are also new and upcoming features like Tag Surfer, Friend Surfer and My Comments – a result of the WordPress.com platform’s role as a lab for Automattic to test out new features in develop for the WordPress platform. But unlike the downloadable version of WordPress, you can’t touch code (a blessing and a curse), can’t upload new plugins (a curse, indeed) nor upload new themes. It’s like buying a brand new car and finding out spare parts do not exist – what you get is what you have. Period.

My biggest gripe is still with the plugins – the WordPress.com people insist that if you pester them enough they’ll upload the plugins that you want. But why should you? Your time is precious – better to work on your characters and fine tune your plot.

Categories aren’t needed for a blook, but it does allow you the freedom to write about other things alongside your chapters. Extra pages are a welcomed feature at any rate – you can create ‘about me‘ and ‘about the story‘ pages – something that may be done in Blogger, but not very well. The RSS feed provided are basic, and enough for any blook you may create, but that’s just me being biased since Feedburner offers so many other features that complement your content. I’m not sure you can even burn a WordPress.com feed and set that as the feed for autodetection, since – as mentioned before, sigh – there’s no way to edit your theme code.

Support

Support for WordPress.com is definitely above average – since its so scaled down there are few problems, most of the time. Enquiries are dealth with quickly and politely, and there’s a general sense of helpfulness in the forums. Can’t post? Check if you’re clicking the big button marked publish. Don’t know what’s a blog? Read the codex. Want a specific plugin? Better start bugging us now.

Kidding, kidding.

Reliability

No problems here – the only irk i had early on was that i couldn’t create new categories. A brief trip to the forum told me i wasn’t the only one facing such a problem, and that they were working on a solution. Sure enough – the next day (or was the day after?) i logged in the problem was gone. WordPress.com is solid as a rock, albeit one far less fantastic than its bigger brother.

Conclusion

WordPress.com is … dissapointing, at least to me. While okay for light blooking, this platform suffers serious limitations with no way for you to personalize your blog, or to use Feedburner and other services that could otherwise make your blook easier to read. Use it if you love the WordPress platform, or as a canvas to exercise your writing. Otherwise take a look at Blogger (at least you get some measure of control over the theme you’re using), Blogsome, or just download WordPress and find a server of your own.

Read the next in the series: WordPress.org reviewed!

The Blogger platform has got it pretty good after being acquired by Google and coming out of a second beta. It’s a simple platform, free, instantly available, and very user friendly. The interface has only 3 tabs – posting, settings and template, keeping options easily accessible and providing a simple flow to any first-time blogger.

Ease of Use

Blooger is amongst the easiest blogging platforms to use. You start off with creating an account, choosing a theme and then you can immediately start posting with a simple interface.

One of its biggest attractions is the fact that Blogger is widely supported. You can post with it through email, phone and services like Flickr and Technorati work with Blogger (almost) seamlessly. Setting are very easily tweaked – a button here, an option there.

Looks

You can’t go wrong with Blogger’s default templates – they’re all clean, and beautifully done – both inside (code) and outside (looks). It turns out that the Blogger team hired Stopdesign to do their themes, and a look under the hood of these templates shows just how good these guys actually are.

The main problem with this, however, is the fact that after awhile it all becomes bland. Here is where the ease of use of the Blogger platform shines through. Templates are created in a one page xHTML document, although clever Blogger users have been known to create Flash and Ajaxified Blogger blogs. It’s flexible to a certain degree – but you can’t deny that your coding options are pretty limited. :(

On the up side, it’s incredibly easy to edit or create a template – for beginners, load up Minima and start tinkering. Extra templates can be found here and here, but bear in mind the design elements i talked about in my Writing An Addictive Blook series – particularly the point about fonts needing to be big enough for readers to be comfortable with.

Features

Here Blogger scores less marks. A result of all that ease-of-use is that the Blogger platform is static, or severely limited. With the new Blogger (right out of beta) some of the old platform’s issues have been addressed, but unfortunately there’s bound to be a limit, what with it being a free service and all. What am i talking about? Well, let’s take a look at Blogger’s feed options for example.

By default Blogger offers both Atom and RSS, but what are your options for customizing these feeds? Can you exclude certain categories of posts from ending up being published in your feed? Can you edit the way your feed is presented? No, i thought not. And while Blogger has ‘linkback’ it doesn’t have trackback – the standard used by WordPress and Movable Type blogs.

Of course, a lot of these options aren’t really necessary to a blooker, or any author looking to publicize his/her work, but i’m just showing you some of the limitations you might face throughout your blogging years with the Blogger service. However, if you delve deeper into the community of nice, polite Blogger ‘hackers’, you’ll start coming across many ingenious ways (Feedburner and Haloscan, for example) to overcome some of Blogger’s more glaring faults. But more on that in another post.

Support

Blogger users have a pretty good help guide, and the community is even better. Problem with your Blogger blog? Post the code to the Blogger forums and a solution sould present itself quickly enough. The user written guides to Blogger ‘hacks’, using flash and creating templates is pretty comprehensive – the aforementioned forums has an extremely high concentration of code monkeys, who just love tinkering around with Blogger.

Reliability

There was a slew of posts not too long ago about why Blogger sucks – the usually opinionated blogosphere were extremely outspoken on the way Blogger swallowed up drafts and failed to publish at times, as well as the speed at which the entire platform now runs. While disturbing, i’ve never actually experienced such problems throughout my 4 years of using Blogger, but i’ve had friends show me enough screenshots to believe in the existence of such issues.

Blogger should have ironed out those bugs by now – it is mostly stable. The scheduled downtimes are clear and Blogger makes a point to display the expected time (in GMT) on every account page; not-so-subtly warning errant users to quickly post and finish their work or face the loss of data during maintenance. This can’t be avoided, unfortunately – Blogger likes change and there always seems to be a downtime coming up.

Conclusion

No matter its drawbacks – Blogger is perfect for writing blooks. It may not have trackback or total control over all design elements, but what it does it does well, with a great user-interface and such ease of use anyone with half a brain can immediately pick it up and start writing.

Read the next in the series: WordPress.com reviewed!