Other Bloggy sites
Flicking around the web one afternoon, I found some quite interesting and some useful bloggy type sites.
A couple of years ago, pre-blog years, free web space was rubbish, no space, all adverts and pretty much zero functionality.
Today there's not much free webspace that's particularly special, compared to pay for domain webspace but blog site seem to give out loads of webspace and functionality!
Web Space:
Tripod.lycos.com
The best 'webspace' i found
http://www.tripod.lycos.com/
At tripod.com you get 1gb space with all the basic wizards for novices and file managers and html editors for the more expert users. It doesn't have a database but it does have a cgi bin for perl functionality. I haven't figured out how functionality is possible from this though.
My space:
http://greasytonyus.tripod.com/index.htm
Tripod.lycos.co.uk
http://www.tripod.lycos.co.uk/
This gives you 500mb, a mysql database and php capabilities. It has a lot of functionality but it all has to be hardcoded unless you use wizards but wither way you still have to know what you're doing. Also you have to get a certain amount of usage per month otherwise after a couple of bad months in a row, they delete the site.
It would be nice if you could just download a php forum and upload it to some free webspace. It would get a load of usage, because you would only do this if you have a specific reason, so the adverts would get accessed.
Blogs
A lot of these sites enable you to put tags on your pictures, posts and files etc. Just words associated with that item. It makes your pages really searchable and puts things in multiple catagories really easily.
www.Blogger.com
It's all good, being googley it's very searchable, I haven't found a lot of topicable stuff yet though.
I do like the look of the sites, the functionality is good for what it is, a blog, no more no less. Emailing the blog is really convenient and the rss is really good too. I've got three blog on the go. Two to act as learning diaries for university projects, it makes it really easy for my tutors to keep up with what I'm doing and comment and I can copy and paste it into my report at the end!
I've also got this one, which I use to add stuff on like the occasional oppinion and thing that I need to remeber.
It would be nice if people's posts popped up in normal google searches. Other blog and forum posts do, you'd think that google would want their blogs, with their adverts appearing before the rest, oh well.
Yahoo
http://360.yahoo.com/greasytonyus
Yahoo 360 is some kind of new community thing, it's got good storage on it for pictures and the blog's not bad - with an RSS feed.
As part of the profile you can add your interests in lists. You can then click on an item in the list and y360 will search the rest of the site for other people who also have that item in one of their lists. I'm not there for a date like some people, but it does help to be able to contact people who like the same things if you need. I think that's the best function of y360.
Another great function is the ability to grab rss feeds and display them on your home page, genious idea!
The photos area also links into a place called http://www.flickr.com/
Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/
This site is a god site for storing and sharing pictures. You can upload them or email them to your pages, very functional.
This site uses Tags which you add to help file and find your pictures. You can also search time entire site for pics with certain tags. Very functional and simple!
Clipmarks
http://clipmarks.com/
This is awierd one, but still really good. I think the novelty of it is also very attractive!
The site revolves around a browser pluggin which you turn on and then select parts, pictures, selection of whole web pages and store it on clipmarks, very novel, easy and functional.
I find the site itself very useful, you never know what you're going to find but there's something for everyone!
MSN Spaces
Doesn't really cut it. In the last few years msn and hotmail have slowly become less popular, from my point of view. The fact that the only way you can store you hotmails locally is using outlook, express or msn explorer is not enough. It may be part of the monopoly laws, that restrict functionality though. Still I don't get much out of msn spaces or the community so I haven't bothered with it. I have a passport, well two actually, when I first started using the internet i got a hotmail address, but now I'm a gmail man and I've hooked my gmail account as an msn passport, mainly for msn messenger usage. That is the most convenient instant msg service.
Tagworld
http://www.tagworld.com/
This is almost fantasic site, the appearance is very nice, the functionality is superb, the control over your content is superb and the community isn't half bad either. The only problem is the speed, it is very slow.
I expect trhe speed will improve as the site make more money. There aren't a lot of adverts though so it may not be quick.
It looks to have been created all in ASP.net, which explains the great functionality, but the speed is a mystery. It is a pitty though. It may be quite a new site, i think i recognise some of the functionality as the new bits in ASP 2.0 but I could be wrong.
Still the functionality is gravey. You've got pictures, music, video, blogs, files and fully customisable pages. Just what you need. It's also a community with over half a million members and counting.
The file uploading is superb. Each picture, sound, video or other file has a permanant url, so you can link to it from elsewhere as well as within your own tagworld pages. This is a rare function and well worth taking advantage of!!!
Overall thumbs up, if only it were quicker.
heres my space
posted by greasytony at Wednesday, January 25, 2006
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