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Blogsome - Blogging Site Review
I have to say that I’m very much impressed with what they’ve done over at Blogsome with their version of the Wordpress platform. It’s a quick and easy sign up and you get your choice of about 30 different themes to change the look and feel of your blog. Although I didn’t think but maybe 2 or 3 were very visually appealing to me, you can very easily edit the theme files from within the dashboard area to suit the way you want your blog to look.
One thing that impressed me very much was that the theme I chose was called Minima Plus and is based on the excellent Minima template used at Blogger and originally written by Douglas Bowman. The style sheet for that template is one of my favorites, being very simple to customize. I think the folks over at Wordpress.com should take a look at what Blogsome has done with Wordpress here and follow some of their examples with the addons and options. I particularly liked the option to put a Captcha on the comments to block all automated spam and unlike most that I’ve seen the commenter need only enter the correct numbers to leave a comment, and not have to read seriously warped text that you have to sometimes guess at to get it correctly.
Wordpress.com’s free blogging setup also does not allow any customization of their skins, that means no ads, no blinkies, no sidebar images, not even installing your own hit or stat counters to keep track of visitors. Again at Blogsome, you have free reign to customize to your hearts content, with easy access to your theme files and automated backup in case you accidentally screw it up. Wordpress.com does claim that they intend to allow some customization on their themes in the future however, they do have quite a few very attractive themes for you to choose from in their stables.
Blogsome also does not have any support for importing posts from other blogging platforms if you’re moving your blog from one service to another. This is one feature that I would like to see them implement, and it seems to be the only place where I find their service lacking. This feature is available in the standard Wordpress files that you can install yourself if you use your own hosting, so I know for a fact that it is supported by the latest version of Wordpress.
If you’re looking to start a new blog somewhere and would love to have a very advanced feature set that includes categories, spam blocking, spam control, theme customization, recent comments lists, drop down sidebar lists for previous posts and archives and a sidebar calendar, you really should take a look at what Blogsome has to offer!
Technorati tags: blogsome, wordpress, blogging, themes, blogs
