Jennifer Yoon User Review of Blogger.com and blogging

This is actually not at all easy to use. It takes forever to upload pictures. It's like pulling finger nails off of a female prison torture victim. Yeee-yikes! I will just have to figure out how to get my own website working again (don't know who has the password for admin privileges anymore). And get FrontPage 2003 to work again and play nice with me. Microsoft apps keep asking for the original CD even after I thought I specified full install. Next time, I will make an image CD and keep that along with the passkey digits. I don't know where the CD is for FrontPage 2003, although I do have the passkeys (since Word 2003 etc. are already installed I can look it up as part of the Office Prof 2003 package). I've moved recently cross country... so have not found, reinstalled, organized all things yet.

Blogger's free templates make headers WAYYYYY toooo BIGGGGG! I tried to see if I can manually change it to something close to normal size, but I can't find the Html code for font size on blog titles. I can't place the pictures on the page where I want to. It's difficult to manipulate placement. Other people's blogs look SOOOOO MUCH NICERRRR. I'm definitely sure they did not use the built-in editor to create their blog posts (at least not the free one). I need to find a free web hosting site for pictures and text that is better at providing page layout tools and more sane free page templates. Maybe the title fonts are so big in order to score higher on the Ad Sense rankings. It makes for a poor looking template.

I tried to use Mambo a while back, but it got merged, then overwhelmed by users, then relauched and lost some archieved data... Anyway, I am not a programmer and it was too daunting a task to learn a new language just to write my personal webpages on Mambo.

I will stick with FrontPage 2003 until I can devote more time to learning Ruby, Rails and MySQL at the same time. Wait--, Bill told me about Adobe Flex2 using Flash 9. It looked a lot like a FileMaker development & template environment. (I love developing on FileMaker and have been supporting my Dad's business database on it for 20? years now). Flex2 has rectagles and text boxes that I can drag and drop. Fonts can be chaged from a drop-down menu. This might be a solution for non-programmer like me. Although, I am not a total newbie because I was editing on DOS text editor and programming on AutoCAD and Lotus123 long before Windows 3.1. But it seems that everything I know is at a MUCH lower level (machine code Intel 8088/80286, VLIW when that was done only on supercomputers), and so it does not seem to help at all in this web progamming age. I keep expecting it to be easy to publish a web page, but it isn't yet. On the desktop, applications to create a simple Word document with embedded pictures and text that flow around the pictures are easy as cake to create. Why isn't it similarly easy on the web?

I guess it will become that easy, but just not yet.
Even machine language had quite a bit of time to develop. Boolean algebra may have been around since late 1800's and the Disk Operating System (stored on a floppy disk) also had been around for good number of years by the time I was using them in early 1980's.

Waiting for it to get better... going to see if I can find get the Admin privilege on my personal website... Looking to do more unpacking and organizing per David Allen's GTD.
- JY

Update: saw SiteKreator. Has much better free templates and seems easier to control page layout of pictures. Limited to 10 MB only on the free account. Will check it out for my personal websiter. -- JY