I recently deliberated over whether to change my blogsite. I had been thinking about setting up a new blog because the quicktag tool bar was unreliable in the Safari browser. I use Safari because of its highly sophisticated RSS notification. Unfortunately Blogsome doesn’t support Safari and the quicktag tool bar for writing entries would often disappear and I would have to hand code formatting and links. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when my Blogsome blog was infiltrated with spambots. It was then I decided to jump boat and set up a blog with Blogspot (Blogger).
No sooner had I registered my new site with Blogspot I realised that it didn’t support trackback only backlink. Backlink only allows you to keep track of who’s been commenting on your site but doesn’t use pingback to inform others that you’re commenting on their blog. However, trackback can be a tool for spamming, which my Blogsome blog had also been affected by. Blogspot was attractive because it was easy to use, supported Safari, had inbuilt mechanisms for combating spam amongst other inbuilt features that were easy to use. So I debated whether to continue with Blogsome or Blogspot.
My blog was developed for my Masters of Media Production at RMIT University and it’s assessed on evidence of networked communication through trackbacks and weblinks. For this reason, I decided to persevere with Blogsome for the sake of trackback and somewhat reluctantly settled for Mozilla Firefox as my browser. I may re-visit this decision in the future depending on whether Firefox updates its RSS capacity and whether or not I continue to get spam through trackback.
One of the blog sites I looked at ‘Miles to go…’, outlined other advantages and disadvantages, with many comments.
