New Beginnings

All right!

I've decided to start afresh. For a long time I've looked for a blogging service that consolidates all the features I want in a blog. I found several that encompassed a few of those features, but never one single service that had them all.

Well, if you're reading this, then you've come from my Myspace blog, a service I stuck with because it included the most of the features I wanted. But now, with some tweaking of Blogger and other Google-provided services, I think this is as close as it comes.

Let me give you a brief tour:

1. Subscriptions. There is a subscription button on the left. You can type in your email address directly to subscribe to a Google Groups mailing list that will receive email everytime I post a new entry. Just like Myspace (well, when it works, anyway)! Or, better yet, if you have a Google account (and I believe most of you do, almost all of you are either on Blogger or Gmail) you can sign in with that account and join the group.

2. RSS feeds. Highly recommended for those of you who don't mind setting up a feed reader to keep track of your favorite blogs. Myspace already provides an RSS feed for its posts, but it doesn't include the entire entry. Blogger, on the other hand, provides the entire post in the RSS feed AND it has an RSS feed for comments, so you'll know straight away when someone posts a new comment anywhere on this blog.

3(a) Comment notifications. If you'd prefer not to use RSS, you can still leave a comment using your Google/Blogger account, and check the option to receive new email when a new comment is posted to that particular entry.

3(b) Alternatively, you don't HAVE to have a Google or Blogger account to leave a comment-- you can leave a comment with just your manually-typed-in name. But you won't be able to take advantage of email comment notifications. Still, you can use the RSS feed to keep track of new comments.

4. Comment threads. Myspace's best feature!! Someone decided to tweak Blogger's template code to allow comments to be displayed in nested fashion. It's slightly tedious-- you have to remember to copy and paste a string of numbers (which is provided when you hit the Reply link) into the FIRST line of your comment, in order for it to correlate to the correct entry, but it's worth it and works like a charm :-)

The only feature that Blogger doesn't have, that Myspace does, is the ability to lock select posts as "friends-only". But I figure, I rarely post such entries anymore, anyway. And on the rare occasion that I do, since most of you migrated here from Myspace, I can always post the protected entry ON Myspace, and put the link here.

Voila! There you have it. I hope to start blogging here more permanently. Here's to more years of successful blogging! :-D