blogger v. xanga v. typepad

well, i think its a little too late now to move all my shizz over to typepad. back when i was thinking about where to host "the cheeky monkey" i was really just choosing between friendster, blogger, and xanga. i was particularly enamoured by the xangazon feature, which allows you to post a thumbnail of your current music/reads/movies--something i felt i couldn't really do on blogger (i think i tried and gave up). turns out, though, typepad offers a similar feature, along with easy commenting and photo albums.

however, typepad is not free, and that was definitely a deterrant. another thing which probably intimidated me a little bit was that it did not have a WYSIWYG editor, and i had little confidence in my html skillz. however, it turns out that html ain't so bad, and since my browser does not seem to support xanga's WYSIWYG editor anyways, i end up coding most things manually. nothing too complex... just simple tags.

aside from being free, what i do like about xanga is that it is so simple, for the blogger on the run. i remember when i blogged on blogspot, way back in the day (check out my NYC roadtrip blog: NYCorBust.blogspot.com), i think you had to save, and then publish, or something like that. it took a long time, and editing posts, if i remember correctly, was not that easy. i like how i can hop on xanga with my random thoughts and gee-whiz trivia, post something quickly, then peace out. probably my only real frustration is that someone actually needs to sign up for xanga in order to comment... so i frequently get emails instead of eprops (keep 'em coming btw).

anyways, here is the article i referred to when i first started blogging (this time around), for those of y'all who are inspired by the cheeky monkey and hope to have a blog to call your own one day: pc magazine's "blog tools" which i found via the calico cat. i'm also available for basic html tutorials. holla.

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update:

holy crap! just for kicks i attempted to log onto my dashboard on blogger and actually got my user name and my password (from three years ago) correct. here's my ambitious, yet brief, attempt to blog about my political science class with professor tessler on the arab-israeli conflict: polisci353.blogspot.com. i think i was hoping to prove that blogs could really be leveraged as an academic learning tool, but the class got intense pretty damn quickly, and time was not on my side.

speaking of online learning, my org dynamics group is utilizing a wiki space to coordinate our research for our upcoming paper on accenture. alls i can say is, i really dig it.
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update:

hm. now that i think about it... i believe friendster blogs are powered by typepad, and i hated their cms--it was annoyingly complex and clumsy. go xanga.