The slightly lengthy silence has been due to busy times at work and my little free time spent figuring out the best way for the Mount Florida Community Council website, which we decided to set up as a blog. Why a blog? Mainly because it enables not so web design confident people to contribute. Secondly, because it's easy for a larger number of people to contribute, thus ensuring co-ownership. While waiting for the go ahead for a blog on civiblog (my preferred option was to host it there, both because of the ethics behind civiblog and for the slightly egoistic reason that I'm most confident using and customising a blog on this platform), which took longish due to the success of civiblog and the resulting waiting list for new blogs, I had a look at the various blogging options. My research into the different types of softwares and free blogs made me realise that there aren't actually that many free platforms out there. Blogger is the obvious one, but mostly, blogs either cost a bunch, or are full of advertising.

Eventually I came across some information on functionality and a comparison of services, and Wordpress came out best there, and is very open sourcy as well, so I gave it a go, especially as I couldn't do much with the not yet assigned new civiblog space. Well, Wordpress certainly came recommended, but if you are looking at having a template blog hosted at wordpress.com, there are both pluses and minuses in comparison with Civiblog. Wordpress allows the creation of pages, which makes it look like a proper website. Nice. Not so nice is that customisation is very limited indeed, and nice features of civiblog, such as adding a photo or image to your header, are simply not there. Of course, if you know what you're doing you can download the software and host it yourself and customise to your heart's content, but that is obviously time consuming and involves having a server to host it on. Somehow, with what is available as templates, I couldn't quite share the enthusiasm of other users. Civiblog may not have the option of pages (please correct me if I'm wrong and I simply haven't found it) but this is easy to work around by using categories and posts. I also found the actual posting procedure much easier, so that the civiblog will be easy to use for total beginners. I also really missed the option of having sticky posts - essential if you want to use a blog as a website, because you simply need some initial information.

But there were glitches too, which drove me bananas. On wordpress, posts posted to specific categories would not appear there, while currently the civiblog site doesn't change the template for some bizarre reason. I solved the first problem, no idea how, so confident that some magic will happen on civiblog soon too. Interestingly, it took me a lot more time to even figure the essentials of the wordpress tools and features out, even though there were less of them, while setting up the same blog on civiblog took me only 2 hours while watching TV at the same time. Ok, part of this is of course already being familiar with features, and having the advantage of simply copying posts from one blog to the other, but still.

Finally, I added a php forum, through one of the many free, but advertisement heavy, php forum providers. Previously I had used forumup.com, but their server was down, so I used myfastforum.com, not such a nice name, but what the heck. It worked in no time and the choice of templates seemed much wider than in forumup.

I shall now leave it to my fellow community councillors to decide which of the two blogs is more intuitive to view and to use, after having added some more content that is. Let's see if I can prove the critic wrong who feared that the website wouldn't be used and be a waste of time.