a bit more personal

Read my personal weblog – sexspresso.blogspot.com.

Where to Blog?

For the past 10 or so years I’ve been a blogger. I’ve moved and experienced various blogging platforms and I must say it’s very difficult to decide where a person should blog. A couple of people have asked me for advice on what platforms to use so I decided to do a brief entry on the different platforms I’ve experienced.

– Xanga –

When I first started blogging Xanga was at the peak of its popularity. My generation was probably the most active generation on Xanga and now that we’ve all moved on with our lives no one honestly gives two shits about Xanga. It used to be a place where people (read emos) wrote about their shit lives, brief moments of happiness, and reblogged over the same entry with every update to accumulate the number of comments they’ve received in a weak attempt to look popular. Web design for the site was at its most prominent and people genuinely wrote for themselves and not for the approval of others. Oh how things have changed!

The Xanga community nowadays has pulled a complete 180. Xanga has split up into several sister sites that focus on special topics, such as Lovelyish for fashion (read Cosmo reading bimbo) bloggers, Revelife for the more spiritual (read uber Christian zealot) bloggers, and Mancouch, a blog site focused on straight men (read women trying to act like men for approval) and their stereotypical ways (aka shortcomings).

Most of the bloggers on Xanga are very representative of the American population – far below the average human intelligence level, yet desperately flaunting such ignorance for approval. To gain popularity in the Xanga world is to never blog for yourself; you must always blog for the sake of being controversial and riling emotions out of other bloggers. In the Xanga population this is very easy to do, as whenever just the slightest bit of drama arises the entire blogging community will feel it’s their duty to blog about it and put in their two cents.

As for customization of blogs, those with web design experience have long left. Hence the “themes” section of Xanga, where poorly made designs with pixelated images reign supreme. I’d say about 90% of the web layouts that people use/have on Xanga are equivalent to horse shit set on fire with a blow torch; they’re eye sores and they smell funny. For someone with web designing experience they could go to Premium sections of the site where placing their own HTML code is as simple as Blogger‘s template page, but for a price. In order to get the most out of this (highly useless and life killing) site you’ll need to pay the premiums.

I suppose if you plan on being a troll or you simply want attention, Xanga is the place to be.

– Livejournal –

Livejournal used to be the place to be for people who ran various types of communities – web design, graphic design, emotional support, etc. Livejournal’s set up is rather confusing and disorganized. In order to do half the things you’d like to do you’d have to go through a labyrinth of links to get to where you need to be. If Livejournal could clean up their set up it would make for a great blogging community if it weren’t for one thing…

The community is dead! No one uses Livejournal anymore unless they’re really desperate to keep their blog hidden from their friends and family. Most of the community forums haven’t been updated in years, not that there’s that many to choose from to begin with either. I wouldn’t recommend Livejournal for anyone who is just starting to enter the blogging scene, or really anyone for that matter.

– Blogger –

Powered by Google, so if you have a g-mail account you automatically have a Blogger account as well. Simply go to Blogger.com and type in your e-mail address and password to see your dashboard.

Over the years Blogger has been dominated by foreign bloggers, and fewer and fewer American bloggers are turning to the platform to blog. Unlike Xanga and Livejournal, customization is very easy and straightforward. Sure, there are some quirks with the site here and there but all technicalities aside it’s a very good platform. The idea of a “community” is rather taboo however. Most people you’ll encounter on Blogger are people you’ve already known in real life and they told you OR through a site that has something to do with some aspect of blogging and people simply use it to network, such as Blogskins.com; an American based site focused on (shitty and repetitive) web design. 99% of the contributers on the site are 13 year old Singaporeans. That should say something to you.

While having the e-mail/blog bundle is extremely convenient, Blogger makes it very difficult to network. Several famous bloggers such as Xiaxue have used this platform as the basis for their fame, but even most of them started off simply blogging for themselves and fellow classmates during grade school. A lot of them have even expressed regret for starting off on Blogger, and would rather have used platforms such as our next one.

– WordPress –

WordPress is a far more professional blogging platform. It’s very clean cut and easy to communicate with people with similar interests and blog topics. The only problem I see so far is that by itself it lacks a sense of style. Customization of one’s blog is a painful process with WordPress. However if you’re willing to put in the work for a website and simply use WordPress to power it, then WordPress is the place for you.

– Tumblr –

If you own a Mac more likely than not you own a Tumblr. The great thing about Tumblr (like Blogger and WordPress) is that changing your url is quite simple. Other sites like Xanga often make you pay to change your url, or contribute a certain amount of time in the community before allowing you to do so. If you’re interested in simply looking at tons and tons of reblogged posts/images all the while making no real connection with anyone else on the site, then Tumblr is the place to be. Serious bloggers don’t blog on Tumblr, they just go to Tumblr for fun.

However Tumblr is becoming so popular amongst the mindless that it’s often experiencing down time, something not at all good for the popular blogging site. However the entire point of the site is to be able to quickly share ideas, and no other site does this better than Tumblr.

– Twitter –

Everyone on the damn planet has a Twitter. You can pretty much follow anyone you can think of on the website and pretend like you’re cool enough to have a conversation with every celebrity you find on the site by @ messaging them. 9 times out of 10 they don’t even see your tweet; either they ignore all their @ messages or it’s actually their agent that’s managing their twitter. Yes, this is your cue to run to your designated corner and cry in the fetal position.

While Twitter has its ups and downs (referring to their server here), it has proven to be quite useful amongst businesses and common people alike. I admit, I don’t tweet as often as others do – I am too busy doing other things to have Twitter glued to me at all times, I don’t even have a Twitter app on my phone! But it’s a great way to get people to find you based on similar interests, as well as give brief information on various things in a quick and efficient manner. People can even receive your messages through the phone if they so choose to.

In the blogging world I would advise others to use Twitter as a means to advertise themselves; what they do, who they have networked with, and when they’ve updated their blogs. Twitter is a great compliment to any other blogging site.

 

If you know of any other blogging site that you feel should be mentioned don’t hesitate to let me know. I’m on Tumblr right now and I keep constantly getting this page:

 

 

It truly almost made me want to move back to Blogger.