Posted by
The Interface on Wednesday, February 03, 2010 11:24:38 PM
Those who run blogs here at Townhall.com know that the blogging platform Townhall gives us is, at best, “plain vanilla,” with not a lot of vanilla in the mix. Since its inception, there have been various bugs, and the feature set is minimal, to put it kindly. Ordinarily, I would say that you get what you pay for, and since this platform is offered to us free of charge, we shouldn’t complain too much. But other free blogging platforms do, in fact, offer much more in stability and features for “the same price.” I have seen many regular bloggers abandon Townhall for other platforms and have followed them to their new sites.
Being high in loyalty genes, however, I resisted this movement, although a significant part of that inertia was more laziness than anything. Now a new utility that doesn’t work with Townhall blogs but does with most of the others has finally kicked my, um, bottom, hard enough to cause me to start moving. As regular readers know (all two of you), I frequently cite Bible verses in my posts as evidence of the relevance of the biblical worldview to the subject of said post. The utility of which I speak is RefTagger and what it does is convert Scripture references into hotlinks that popup the verses cited in the translation of your choice when the reader hovers their mouse pointer over the reference. Very cool, and totally inoperative in Townhall.com blogs.
As I considered the desirability of using this tool in my posts, I also did a more critical review of other blogs and found I would, indeed, like to have some of the features like archives, “best of” lists, and the ability to add other text to sidebars and titles that one just cannot do at Townhall. Activation energy having been thus achieved, I started emailing fellow bloggers who had left Townhall and gone to WordPress, or TypePad, or Blogspot (aka Blogger) and queried them for their reasons they chose the platform on which they eventually landed. I also started looking at the features those platforms offered and found that most of them offered nearly the same feature set and all were improvements on Townhall (surprise!).
While I think I would have preferred to go with WordPress, the free flavor of that platform didn’t support RefTagger, so I’ve have settled for now on BlogSpot.
This, then, is an invitation to all my readers to check out www.theinterfaceofdataandlife.blogspot.com (sorry about the longer name, but there was already someone using theinterface.blogspot.com to blog about computers, and while I’m sure he’s nowhere near as handsome as me, he was there first) where I will mirror my Townhall posts for some time until I master its ins and outs and determine whether or not I want to stay there. I would greatly appreciate comments on anything and everything at this site, including whether or not you think I should stay, from font to color to whether or not you prefer to see the entire post “above the fold,” i.e., with no “fold” as Townhall now does it, or if the “Read more…” option with just the initial 20 lines or so of a post is preferable so that you can determine whether or not you want to read a post and if not can move more quickly to the next post (clear as mud?).
Let the adventure continue!