Trellix Licenses Blogger

I've never cared for the term "blog," but gee, I can't really argue with the idea of a siteful of short newsy items updated several times a day. And everyone seems to agree Blogger is a great way to run your own such site, much better than the crappy alternatives. As Dan Bricklin says, "I didn't like the idea of Blogger being lost in the dotCom crash. Personal web sites were growing and important." So he got his company Trellix to license it. Go check out his account "How The Blogger Deal Happened" (and/or read the press release).

This is a Good Thing (tm).

This is good because it ensures the long-term survival of Blogger. The licensing deal gives Pyra Ltd. the money to continue to maintain (and scale) its servers, upgrade the technology, and possibly work on a more viable business model (like selling Blogger Pro, or finally completing the underlying architecture, the project-management software simply called Pyra).

Meanwhile, the most popular and easiest-to-use weblog-software gets an even bigger audience, through Trellix partners such as About and Tripod. Soon people at those services will have something like a checkbox option to start a blog; won't that be an explosion! This will lead to competitive pressure for other services like Geocities to offer something similar.

For those of you too young to remember, Dan Bricklin of Trellix is one of the original independent software developers [digitalcentury.com], from back in the 1980s. His first major product, Visicalc [bricklin.com], basically invented the spreadsheet [about.com] program concept from scratch. [You can even download an MS-DOS executable [bricklin.com]!] Maybe someone else would have had the idea of putting a paper spreadsheet on the screen and letting you enter not only numbers but equations, but he was the first, and it revolutionized the PC industry. Later he was responsible for Dan Bricklin's Demo (a quick way to mock-up several screens of potential software for clients, sort of a mix of Powerpoint and Flash in its day -- and still sold as Demo-It!), and then Trellix, which was ahead of its time as a templating engine. Templates are all the rage now, but they weren't an obvious next way to go a few years back.

And basically it shows what kind of a guy Bricklin is; his company could easily have jealously set out to clone Blogger instead, but he saw an existing userbase and brand and also saw a way to redeem karma points (you know, the OLD kind of karma points, the kind that accumulate until you die) by saving a company roughly the way that Lotus (in those days the #2 or #3 commercial software vendor) saved HIS company way back when.

Blogger is certainly limited in some ways. It's dead simple, which makes it easy to set up for your grandma, and it offers online posting from almost anywhere. But it doesn't have discussions (said to be in unreleased Blogger Pro [dashes.com]) and it doesn't let you do anything outside the blog format, so you can't use it to manage your entire site. And if you're at /. you may be interested in hacking code anyway. In that case there are certainly alternatives -- LiveJournal and Greymatter [noahgrey.com] among them, and sliding up to the big boys like Slashcode, Zope and PHP Nuke. (There are also the hosted solutions, like Pitas or Dave Winer's Manila, itself the center of an interesting tangential experiment in content-management, Radio.) Those are certainly better for managing a wide-ranging site, and they allow membership and member content creation as well.

I started out with Blogger (I was one of the first users), and though I've been working with a couple of the more comprehensive products behind the scenes, for other purposes, I still do my weblog with Blogger. There's just no reason to change. And now with the Trellix investment, I don't have to worry about Pyra doing the fish-on-the-beach thing.

Just remember that not everyone is interested in -- or capable of -- hacking code just to post their thoughts every day. If you want to play with code, and I have no problem believing that's true of most Slashdotters, Blogger may not be right for you. But it's probably right for a lot of people.
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lake effect [lakefx.nu] weblog

Crappy Alternatives

The reason why Blogger is better than other Crappy Alternatives is simple: people can sign up for a Blogger account at Blogger dot com and use it as a part of their own site, which, in most cases, will be hosted on some sort of free webspace provider (geocities for instance).

Slashcode needs it's own server - not everyone has that. Blogger is far easier if you just run a small website ... and I don't think the Blogger-code is free anyway.

Pointer to source

look here:
http://www.livejournal.com/files/code/ [livejournal.com]