Tag: blogging platforms

Still Looking at Blogging Platforms

I’m not planning to leave wordpress.com.

I think.

I spent some time digging into Medium today and I have decided that I absolutely love the way it displays images. They just look really good. After using ello for a while, the Medium editor doesn’t piss me off quite as much as it did initially. I still don’t see a way to pull in images from other domains. That means no using Flickr hosted pics. That was completely offensive to me at first, but since I started messing with ello, which like Medium also forces you to upload images you want to display rather than hosting them on other sites, it doesn’t seem quite as insulting.

Still, it doesn’t seem to have a way to display audio files. That’s a deal breaker if the question is using Medium exclusively. Again, ello is the same way. Hell, technically wordpress.com is the same way too, I just found a work around. Maybe I’ll find one for Medium (and ello) as well.

I was also planning on spending some time with Roon and Svbtle, but I guess Medium bought Roon and is about to shut it down. Ghost is the talk of the town right now, but it does not have a service that is both hosted and free. It’s only one or the other. Maybe I’ll look into free hosting (does that even exist?) and see what’s out there. If I were to go that route though, why wouldn’t I just switch over to wordpress.org?

I’m still not even sure why I am suddenly interested in all of this.

While I’m here, let me try something. Earlier tonight I decided that I was going to play around with Gimp. Think of Gimp as an open source alternative to Photoshop. I’ve had it on this machine for quite a while (it’s free) but I have never actually even opened it. Tonight I picked an image from Flickr and pulled it into Gimp to see how big of a mess I could make. I included it in a post on ello. Now that I’m thinking of it, can I pull the image from ello into this post? It should work. I have a valid url. But does ello block hits from within image tags? Let’s see…

Did it work?

Blogging Platform Options

What is it about December that makes me start thinking about switching blogging platforms? Actually, I am not really thinking about switching anything, just curious about what’s out there.

I posted this to ello today:

I have a blog on wordpress.com. I post to it multiple times a day. I used to use blogger, but I made the switch about two years ago. I use tumblr too, a little, but not really.

I don’t want to go to the full wordpress.org, at least not yet. I played with Medium a little bit, but it seems like a pain to use it for multimedia (I post tons of pictures as well as the odd video and some audio).

I’m not really looking to change platforms, but if I were… where should I go? What other free blogging platforms are worth trying out?

Note, ello won’t be an option until I can use images from Flickr and audio via direct links from alonetone.com, and video from either Vimeo or Youtube.

What do you think?

Granted, I wrote that on ello so I don’t think I’ll get any responses. Just curious what services are out there that I haven’t heard about yet. Let me clarify, what free services are out there that I haven’t heard about yet. Blogging is a hobby that I really don’t want to have to pay for. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use the full wordpress. I don’t want to pay for hosting. I don’t actually want to even have to spare one single thought ever to hosting.

Anyway, I might pose this question to Twitter and Quora too. That will make four online communities that I ask that result in zero responses.

Cool.