Saturday, September 09, 2006

I don't really care about web-logs.

I don't really care about web-logs. ie I don't hate them.

I read Cringely's Essays. I read Schneier's web-log posts. I also read
Paul Graham's Essays and Joel Spolsky's web-log-like posts. I read this
content because it is worth reading. I don't care about the blog/no-blog
difference in these cases.

Aggregating a bunch of posts from different sources into one common
interface seems like a reasonable thing to do. RSS seems to make sense.
Just like email with folders and filter rules seems to make sense.

I sometimes read web-logs and I think RSS is a good idea so why don't I like
to use web-logs myself? For the same reason I don't use an Apple Mac.
The tool is slow, confusing, difficult to configure, and difficult to use.

Blogger / Blogspot has a poor user interface. It's hard to find the page
I am looking for. There are links missing. It's slow to load and click
through to get to the page I am looking for. ie I don't have the patience
to use blogger.

5 comments:

Christian said...

Why use someone else's? You're right they are slow and never do exactly what you want them to. This is just a good reason to set up your own on your own server.

Lakin Wecker said...

have you tried setting up the "mailto" so that you can just continue sending us email, the way you normally do, and you can include that email address on it so that it gets posted here too?

Mike said...

Macs are only slow if the hardware is slow. I'm using a Mac right now and it's no slower then my Windows machine or my Linux machine.

Blogs have been around for a while. Web-logs are not new, but the idea of the masses being able to post quickly and frequently to a personal blog is.

Email and traditional web publishing is a lot more mature and has had time to iron out a lot of bumps. Blogger/Blogspot/Blogging in general is a young concept and their bumps will only get ironed out through use.

Blogging Vs. Mailing

Mike said...

Cringely's, Schneier's, Graham's and Spolsky's Blogs all have RSS feeds:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/rss2.xml
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.xml
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/feeds/pgessays.rss
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml

Rantinator said...

Macs are only slow if the hardware is slow. I'm using a Mac right now and it's no slower then my Windows machine or my Linux machine.

I had a dual-G4 400 MHz Mac on my desk for 22 months as my main work machine. That was years ago. It was full of pretty vector based animation but it was slow.

One time I tried to delete every email message from a folder on the Mac. I selected all messages and selected to delete them or move them to the trash or something. Now there were 10 000 messages (I'm not kidding.) but it tied up the machine for four hours. ie it pinned the load average at over 1.0 for four hours. During that time I was not able to use the email program.