Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forMay 5th, 2005 | back to home

5 May 2005
Filed under:Personal,Useful web resources at6:28 pm

Just a quick note to mention to any of my friends or fellow academics that read this that I am often logged into Skype these days (now that I have a laptop with built in mic and speakers). For those who don’t know Skype is a mixture of instant message application and Internet telephone). My Skype ID is, unsurprisingly, “DavidBrake”. If I don’t know you please let me know why I should let you connect to me (I set my Skype to “contacts only”).

Update: That’s “DavidBrake” not “David Brake” as I thought…

Traditionally if you wanted a WordPress weblog (open source so free to use and arguably the most feature rich blogging product around) you needed to be techie yourself or at least have a techie friend with server space spare. Certainly it is only thanks to my own connections in the tech fraternity that I have been able to have this blog hosted using first Moveable Type and now WordPress.

Recently, however, I have discovered that blogsome offers a free hosting service similar to blogger‘s so anyone reading this could have a blog like mine. I’m a little concerned that blogsome don’t have any apparent means of gathering revenue to offset the cost of hosting so they could disappear one day – particularly if they get popular – but my guess is that by the time they do there will be lots of other places able to take over hosting.

If you are already running a weblog using another service you may need a little help getting your archives across to this new platform but once you have taken the plunge I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth it to get features like categories, password protected posts and an extensible architecture for people to add features.

I am not using blogsome myself – instead this weblog, like my other group weblog at the LSE is now generously hosted by Tim Duckett.

Hope you enjoy the new look. Feel free to comment with suggestions and do let me know if there are any problems.

P.S. If you are in the UK don’t forget to vote!