I'm drowning in blogs. Each of them are useful for updating a specific website or allowing me to sound off on a specific topic, but I need a one-size-fits-all solution. Currently I'm scattered over a handful of different mechanisms. According to this article, the word for what I'm trying to do is "blogstreaming."
That is, I need to be able to use a single interface for creating my posts or articles, and then with categories or some other classification tool, and syndication or some other way of supplying content to multiple front ends, send the content where it belongs. I've thought that MT can do this, but I've been slow to get it going. Looks like RU might be able to do the trick as well. I think I need to learn more about RSS.
categories: metablog
7:24:25 PM 
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Erik Speckman linked to my comparison and had these comments to add:
I'd add that updating Live Journal from any web browser is much more natural than doing the same thing with Radio. With live journal, one web browser is the same as any other because the blog management application is a traditional web application. With Radio, updating from something other than your main desktop takes some extra effort. You have to change security settings, open your firewall, keep your desktop on all the time, etc.I have a news & ideas blog on live journal but I have always felt a bit uncomfortable with it because, at least from my point of view, LiveJournal's culture seems much more about naval gazing and the intimate yet mundane details of people's lives.
Oh, one other difference, Radio is better about providing statistics about who is linking to you than LiveJournal.
I tend to agree that LiveJournal's community seems to be more of the diary type (viz. Diaryland vs. Pitas in the old days), although this is a matter of culture and branding and not so much the technology
5:49:59 PM say what []
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I think the fear of losing all my content in an LJ server disaster is what worries me the most. I religiously make XML dumps of my LJ content once a month, and hope that if I migrate to another system in the future it accept XML input so I can move the content over easily. I'm more tempted to switch to RU all the time. Thanks for the analysis! |
| Good summary. One thing I thought about while writing up my own thoughts is that Radio gives better information about incoming links to your posts. |
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I'd say that's a pretty good summary. I think in the end it really boils down to how much control you want over things. Radio gives you a lot more control over how things look. It's also more then just a blogging application. It's a web site management application. If I want to add a document to my web site I don't go to the web server and add it. I just drop it in the www directory in my Radio install and it gets upstreamed to your site automagicly. Radio also has a fairly powerful engine behind it that even lets one add their own features. |
| let's not forget blogger.. publish to your own server, easy to add commenting if you so desire, free, easy to use... and on and on and on.. |
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I know it's bad form to comment on one's own post, but this way I can do some follow-ups. Or should I just be making new posts to make these comments? It's true, as Scottros pointed out, that the comment feature is kinda hidden. In fact, all my posts show 0 comments right now, so I didn't even know I had any comments to read. I'm going to have to poke all of my posts now to see if anything else is missing. To Scot: I know I should be dumping my LJ stuff and I haven't done so yet. That is worrisome. I'm not trying to move you to RU though. I'm trying to be agnostic here. I do know that I can't keep using umpteen systems myself without going insane. To Erik S.: I'll read your thoughts in a mo. Are you talking about the referrer log info? That is always interesting. I think MT does this next. In fact I'm thinking MT vs. RU should be the next matchup, though I still have a lot to learn about MovableType. To Gregory: LiveJournal's templates are also highly customizable (as are Blogger's and MT's), so I'm not sure how Radio gives you more control. In fact, what first turned me off to Radio Userland was that it seemed that everybody had to have that coffeecup design. MT also has some of the website management features. There's another product (in one of those articles I linked to) that enables you to fill multiple newsholes on a single page. That would definitely help with more sophisticated design. Not every web page has just one dynamic area! I was wondering about putting files out on the site. Also, what is the purpose of Stories? Are those just supposed to be more permanent content? I think the extensibility of RU is key. Like Blosxom, the fact that it's really just a set of fiendishly clever scripts and hacks taking advantage of the infrastructure of the Internet is incredibly cool. To robb: I haven't forgotten Blogger! I'll definitely do more comparisons. I figure a series of head-to-head comparisons (and not all just X vs. Radio) will be valuable to readers of my blog-about-blogging. Lastly, again replying to Scot's comment at my LJ blog (to wit: "Damn, it's starting to sound like RU is worth the money! I'm going to have to take it for a test drive one day soon. I would imagine the automatic number assignment is only for use on Salon - you wouldn't have that when using it on your own host. I really like that RU has its own aggregator."): I'm not sure you can host your RU blog on your own server, or if it is possible, you would then no longer show up as part of a community. For example, by using the Salon system, I have a built-in potential audience of Salon readers and Salon bloggers. Now judicious use of RSS feeds and encouraging people to subscribe to you would weave you in even if you were hosted at a community of one, but I have to tell you that checking for recent updates and viewing the rank of my blog among Salon blogs is part of the fun. Scott Rosenberg's hostly blog linked to mine in a round up today and I'm currently number 6 for the day (with one of the lower numbers being Scott's own cornerstone blog and another one that mentions pornography). It's heady stuff. I still haven't given up on Movabletype, which has a new TrackBack feature to facilitate two-way links between blogs, regardless of how their processed and hosted. With the Blogger API mirroring (and the ability to update an RU blog using any Blogger API client), I do see a little convergence coming along. I'd love to use a single back end and categories to feed content to various front ends. Whether I end up doing this with RU or MT is an open question. I love LiveJournal, but it is starting to feel a bit like an island. Oh, well. Lots to think about. Thanks for posing the original question. I have to follow up with some other head-to-head comparisons over the next few days. |
categories: metablog
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1:53:26 PM say what []
Superficially, LiveJournal seems geared more toward the diary type of blog, while Radio Userland seems a little more content-neutral, but functionally there's no real reason for this beyond the names of the products (or are they systems). Both provide community features, with comments and ways to see what other people on the same system are doing. LiveJournal facilitates links between and comments from others on the system. Radio users who share the same remote server (whether Userland or blogs.salon.com) can see who has posted recently, what are the most highly ranked posts (in terms of hits), and where referrers are coming from.
LiveJournal hosts your content on their servers. With Radio, your content database resides on your own computer, which the client software turns into a server for the purposes of the scripts that run the interface, but Radio also hosts the publicly viewable pages on central servers. If LiveJournal disappeared tomorrow and you had not backed up your posts, you[base ']d be s.ol. With Radio, you could point your client at another host server and be back in business right away.
Radio enables categories for classifying your posts and selectively supplying them to different front-ends (LiveJournal does not). Both products enable RSS feeds but, although I have only dabbled in this so far, my impression is that Radio's implementation is more sophisticated. Radio also comes with an RSS aggregator which makes it easy to choose stories for links in your blog. Another unique radio feature is a mirroring tool for duplicating your posts on other systems via the Blogger API.
Geez, that's 259 words and counting. I'll post a 50-word summary for Scot at my LiveJournal bodega.
Have I missed out on any important features or salient differences between these two systems?
categories: metablog
9:09:58 AM say what []
