Evaluating a Blog Service

1. Storage and Bandwidth

Some blogging services enforce that you store images such as banners and profile pictures elsewhere - away from the actual blog webspace. In this particular case, you can use a free photo storage facility such as photobucket etc. Load the image up there, and take the full URL to input into the area in your blog you want this image to appear.

Other services provide a limited storage space, or with paid-for services, different levels of storage space in Gigabytes to allow your own storage of files and images. My own service, Squarespace, allows me to buy additional gigabytes as needed, at around $1 per gig. However, if I’m doing this because my blog has exceeded bandwidth limitations, the charge is backdated for the full service year.

Bandwidth is also something to consider from the upshot. Each time someone browses to their blog and downloads a page into their browser they are using your bandwidth. If you have a lot of images on the blog (ie lots of rotating gifs on the sidebar, or animated images) this uses up a lot of bandwidth to download. For this reason ensure you always save your images / jpegs for the web (most photo image editors have the option to Save for Web) and to a certain minimum size (the standard is around 100mb per image). If you think you are going to get to a point where you offer files to download directly from your blogsite, you will have to consider purchasing additional bandwidth to allow for that.

(For large files, many scrapbloggers get around this by not hosting the files on their own blog, but using a file sharing service such as YouSendIt to host the file for a certain time. This means the link to the file only can be shared on the blog, rather than the large file itself).

2. Customisation

Some blog services, particularly the group spaces, don’t allow very much customisation of your blogspace at all. You must follow the format of the page provided, and often can’t use banners etc to add some individuality to the space.

Others provide a limited range of templates to allow some degree of selection of how your blog will look. Some of the free services do allow the insertion of a blog banner also, at a certain size. But for popular services like Blogger for instance, this limited customisation feature comes with a price - that of having to get into the html of the template to insert the banners and links correctly, and having to learn the Blogger tags to allow more external features to be slotted into sidebars etc. See also: Ease of Use

Others such as some paid-for services allow for more templates and variations such as three columns versus two. Those templates are sometimes changeable in colour scheme, background images, widths of columns, and complete customisation of what appears in the sidebars by the blog owner. These normally allow the addition of a blog banner in the header section also.

Paying more for a service means you get more customisation features, such as the ability - should you want it, and be a good web designer - of developing your own templates, or using Cascading Style Sheets to develop an overall look for the site.

3. RSS Feeds

Although many people appear unconcerned about not having a live feed from their blogs, it is frustrating for those of us who use RSS Feed Readers and Aggregators (like Bloglines or Newsgator) to read blogs to find we can not subscribe to a good blog that is not feeding. Many of the community blog sites don’t allow a blog feed, or if they do - the feature is not well known by the users, who haven’t switched it on.

If allowing people to subscribe to your blog is a good thing for you, ensure the service you select allows for this to be turned on. Look for XML or RSS or Atom feeds in the Blog Service information or FAQs.

4. Community or Not Community

There are quite a few separate blog services used by many scrapbloggers due to the features provided. But also, several community blogspaces have opened up to fill a community-gap.

A good example of the later is MyScrap Blog - which has a community of scrapbloggers within it. From the homepage, some of these blogs are featured and  from within a particular blog, you can click on a button at the top to go to the next blog in the sequence.

MySpace is a very good example of another huge community of bloggers, made popular lately by the large cross-section of teenagers using it to setup their own little website, and lots of Indie Bands using MySpace to hold their band events and music. Community blogs in this way can encapture a set of "friends" for the blog who belong in the same community. Scrapbooking.com’s MyPlace offers a similar thing, with a page setup to hold a profile, blog and album links and a list of similar friends or links within the MyPlace community. Many scrapbooking companies like to use Scrapbooking.com’s MyPlace as a means to advertise within a very large community. I would normally recommend if you have a scrapbook product you want to market a little then consider MyPlace to profile this with projects to co-ordinate some interest. However, some of these community-centred blogging spaces offer limited features - customisation, RSS feeds, and the like are often lacking in such spaces. But they are free, and extremely popular.

With individual blogging services, you will need to develop your own community of blogrolls - this is normally not that big a problem as you will find scrapblogs you want to link to and hopefully they will reciprocate, and come to comment also. You may also already have several scrapping friends using such services, so a ready-made blogroll is at hand.

On evaluating your blog service, consider whether it would be beneficial to you to belong to a community sharing space where you can find like-minded friends to feature on your own space, or if an individual more feature-rich blog service is a better option.

5. Hosted Service Vs Hosting Your Own

If you are lucky enough to already own a website (and have paid for some storage space), it makes good sense to host your blog on your own website. There are a few services which allow for this, including Wordpress. Setting up these services is sometimes complicated, but Wordpress has a set of plugins (called widgets) which allow you to add with ease many features to your blogsite setup.

If hosting your own blog, be mindful of security features with the blog service - ensure you have the ability to monitor comment spam etc - and backup of your precious blog journaling and images as well. Backup is something often forgotten. Many paid for and free services out there often go down for some maintenance time to allow for backing up the blogs to fresh servers, or maintenance of them. You will have to do this yourself if hosting on your own web server.

6. Cost

Free - with limited features, or paid-for with more features? It’s almost as simple as that. However, consider some of the above evaluation notes also - bandwidth and storage space have a bearing on future costs, and quite a few paid-for services provide bands or levels of services - the more you pay per month, the more features you get.

Different payment plans are also worth looking at, if you do decide to go immediately into the Paid-For route (ie Typepad or similar). Some services provide different ways to pay. For instance my own blog service provider, Squarespace, allows payments on a monthly basis or yearly - the yearly option is at a discounted price - but hits you in the wallet at that time of the year.

7. Unsurity - Is Blogging a Thing for You?

Scrappers who are unsure would normally be recommended to try out a free service such as Blogger to start off with. Often, this is all that is needed, and the scrapblogger might find themselves at ease with the Blogger format. A community site might also be a better option for those just wanting to try out that online journaling thing.

Many Blogger Users eventually, having caught the blogging bug, may become frustrated with the lack of features or inability to hold photo albums of layouts etc, and move over to another popular but reasonably cheap package option via a Paid-For Service. Typepad is often the place to move to, as the lower end package is only around $5 per month. But this only provides one blog, and no photo album.

If you do want to try a paid-for service - they generally provide a free trial period, of a month. You can sign up and start off on your blog immediately, and see if it’s for you.

8. Ease of Use

Re-read Point 2 on Customisation. All Blogging Services nowadays provide a reasonably good online WYSIWYG editor for inputting your actual blog entries. These normally allow you to format your journal entry into at least font sizes, bolds and italics, and insert URL links reasonably easily. Inserting images can be difficult in some cases, where you may need to host the image elsewhere. But generally you can publish a blog article in a nice format quite easily using the blogging editor engines provided.

Publishing is another matter. Blogger and other free-er services actually require you to republish the entire blog any time you add or edit an entry. You can accidentally edit or save changes on a blog entry only to find you forgot to republish to the blog. Template changes such as inserting a new URL link into the sidebar also require the full republishing of the blog to the web. When you have a few blog entries, this republishing job may take a few seconds or minutes of your time.

Paid-for Services tend to allow you to publish the one blog entry as is, without requiring full re-publishment. Additional features can allow you to draft and save entries, or post date these for publication at a later date (perhaps when you are on holiday?). Updates (rather than edits) - which record the date and time of the added blog entry to an original blog entry - are another feature worth considering if you intend to do a lot of blogging. But for many scrapbloggers all you may want to be able to do is simply add an entry, and publish it live, then perhaps edit it successfully at a later date.

Ease of Use should also be considered for the administration tasks you as a blog owner should be doing. This may involve comment administration, including how easy it is to change security options on comments (enforcing what types of people can add comments to your blog), to IP filtering - if you keep being hit by an evil person who you no longer want to come near your blog, to your statistics or metrics on how many views your blog is getting. This may also include things like administrating your sidebar content - inserting html to put a nice little world clock on your site, turning on XML feeds to allow blog readers to pick your blog up, or even ensuring your precious blog content is backed up for your own records in some type of document (or XML file). Some free-er services for bloggers, particularly around the community blogsites, don’t offer that many of these administration features. For things like statistics you may need to use a third party product - but even then that involves the need to learn how to insert the code for this little stats counter into your sidebar at the appropriate place.

The final thing to consider regarding use of a blog system is compatibility with other outside products. Some Blog Services allow inserts to the blog via outside exchanges. I’m talking here about photo or image inserts, for instance - using an application like Flickr or Hello, you can upload an image as a blog entry on many blogs, provided they accept such inputs. All you have to do is setup Hello, as my example, with your Blog URL and logon data and select the image to publish as a blog entry. This is a good way to get photographs of layouts onto your blogs, but isn’t available through some blog systems.

Some people who are comprehensive bloggers, also like to journal offline. There are quite a few Diary systems available for PCs which allow you to create date-based journal entries and then hit a button to publish these online. These Desktop based applications need to be compatible with the blogging service or system you are using - normally ones based on Moveable Type formats are compatible with such Desktop tools.

So, There’s a Lot to Think About?

Well, yes, and no. The above probably frightened the pants off you, but technically, most scrappers go into a blog without evaluating the many services available, and normally don’t end up regretting it. However, most follow the lead of other bloggers, and simply use one or two popular services, when there are many more out there with additional benefits.  

The vast majority of scrapbloggers just want to blog. So, go out and start one, with at least a little more understanding of some of the things you should be aware of.

Coming Up:

1. A Scrapblog Article listing all the blog services I can think of, in categories, with features and costings.
2. Articles on some of the additional tools available to scrapbloggers which they can play around with.