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Blogsome review: part 1

This is the first part of my (possibly) ongoing review of the free WordPress hosting service, blogsome.com.
Sign-up process:

This couldn’t have been easier; I can’t imagine how it could be improved. From their homepage, you type in the url you want (yourname.blogsome.com), and as long as it isn’t taken you get one very short form to fill out (consisting of only e-mail address and your desired blog “title”). That’s it! You will get an e-mail with the username & password you can use to login and configure, post, etc.

Functionality:

I was surprised to find that they are running a new version (technically 1.3-alpha-4), which contains many of the new 1.5 features, including pages, themes & templates. Dan can comment on more of the new stuff since he’s been using 1.5 for a while.

The default theme is Kubrick, but they have a library of others that you can easily select from, and customize if you want to.

The available options include all the stuff you’d expect, and some you wouldn’t – like image uploading, although the automatic thumbnail generation feature didn’t seem to be working.

A referrers page gives you some stats about who is linking to your blog, etc. including blacklisting functionality, which I’m assuming lets you ban links from certain sites, although they could always just go directly to your site to bypass that (unless you ban direct access, which it looks like you can do also – more on this later)

Downside:

The only real drawback was the fact that you can’t upload and use your own custom plugins, which is understandable considering how they have the system structured and shared with other users. They do include a couple popular plugins that you can use, however, for spam prevention, etc.

Overall, I have been pleasantly surprised with this service. I can’t say enough about the ease of sign-up – you literally have a fully functional WordPress blog up and running within 30 seconds, with no technical knowledge required. It has several advantages over other free blog hosting providers, such as image uploading & hosting, easy to use comments, and speed (Blogger always seems slower than molasses to me), as well as all the other benefits that WordPress brings.

I will plan on posting more as I continue to test it.

12 Comments

Categories: Blog Posts.

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By JB
— January 27, 2005 at 6:12 pm
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12 Responses

  1. It sounds like they are using WPMU (Wordpress Multi-User). I tried to use WPMU today but I was having major problems with it. They have the same plugins as WPMU, the referers, spaminator (assuming), themes, and the fact it runs 1.5.

    Well I was trying to get WPMU working because I wanted to use it for BridgeBlogs. Maybe we can work on it together, if they don’t get off there butts soon. I would love for the bridge to have a real community blog, I need to start to have people register and have them be able to add links and all that other stuff, and then have some moderators. Maybe wordpress isn’t the best way to go but the only one I know of.
    Oh, wait this wasn’t a post about the BridgeBlogs, Sorry.

    Dan — January 27, 2005 @ 9:41 pm —

  2. ooo, that dashed line style looks totally cool. too bad the code for it looks like hell… :-)

    nstryker — January 27, 2005 @ 9:49 pm —

  3. OK, you got me on that one. I didn’t want to take the time to change my stylesheet at first, so I did the styles inline when I posted. Now I went back and did it right – it should be cleaned up now, and quite a bit easier to manage.

    JB — January 27, 2005 @ 9:59 pm —

  4. Re: the multi-user thing – doesn’t regular wordpress have user levels, so that you can allow someone to be able to post but not admin?

    JB — January 27, 2005 @ 10:06 pm —

  5. Yeah but WPMU lets people create blogs easily. Just like blogsome does.

    Dan — January 28, 2005 @ 7:47 am —

  6. ooooo…someone slipped by the great and powerful OZ…I mean Jared.

    martha — February 24, 2005 @ 4:44 pm —

  7. Hey, I already said that i turned off some of my spam filtering plugins while i’m upgrading. this just proves how good they were working – since in the last day i’ve gotten tons (most you won’t see because the moderation filter is still catching most of them)

    JB — February 24, 2005 @ 6:56 pm —

  8. Hi

    I have been using blogsome for a while now.

    What I want to ask is can the google ads be removed? Or I change it to my own google adsense?

    Pratyush — July 4, 2005 @ 1:32 pm —

  9. There may be a technical way of doing it, (although there are some limits on what you can change), but I would imagine that it would violate your TOS to do so. Hey, it’s a free service anyway, so it’s only fair for them to get whatever small amount of money back they can on the ads.

    JB — July 5, 2005 @ 9:05 am —

  10. Yes, under the current terms of service you can remove all Google ads on Blogsome, if you wish – although you will be downgraded to the “people we just like” category from the “people we love” category.

    Roger — July 20, 2005 @ 10:21 am —

  11. give http://gobloglah.com a review.

    here, you can put your own ads on your blog.

    gobloglah.com — December 13, 2006 @ 1:23 am —



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