Last night I setup a new podcast blog for a church project on wordpress.com, and I was very pleased with how easy the process was and the new features which are available there for free. Unlike a WordPress blog you host yourself, you can’t upload and install plug-ins to a blog on wordpress.com, but you do get 50 MB of storage space free and they provide a nice assortment of available templates. I like the new widgets feature as well, although it was a bit frustrating that the “text” widget wouldn’t let me use any code from feedburner, I had to put that code in the actual post instead. Like blogger, wordpress.com will also let you create an unlimited number of blogs with your single login. Their dashboard interface is nice. Overall I was quite pleased and impressed! The main advantage WordPress blogs have over Blogger in my view is categories. Both will let you do multi-user/team blogs, but Blogger still doesn’t support categories although it DOES now support tags. With blogger team members have to have an email address too, which is a drawback for some K-12 settings. I like both tools, and continue to use both. WordPress is my favorite because of its flexibility and plug-in options, however.
Derek Baird alerted me this evening to vox.com as a blogging and social networking environment, which also looks great and feature-rich. He said it seemed to be getting a lot of attention at last week’s NSTA conference in St. Louis. (He incidentally met Buzz Aldrin there. How cool!) Derek is one of a select group that have been helping in the development of the upcoming Yahoo Teachers tools, which look and sound AMAZING. He posted quite a few details about the background a few days ago, again for NSTA where Yahoo Teachers was formally announced. Of the tools, Yahoo Gobbler looks the coolest by far! Can’t wait to give that a try!
The Yahoo Teachers’ site will go live this summer, I’m sure in advance of NECC.
I am regularly AMAZED by the power, diversity, creativity and enabling POWER of web 2.0 tools like these. What a great day to be alive and be a learner! 🙂
Comments
One response to “Blog tools keep getting better”
Wes–just wanted to send you a CyberCompliment (ala Jen’s post at TechnoSpud) for all the great things you share! We’ve learned so much from you about all kinds of topics and tools! Keep up the great work!
Helen (aka techchick @ TechChickTips)