January 25, 2002

3:08 PM

blogger goes pro well, it looks like ev has finally gone and launched blogger pro. hopefully, this will prove to be sucessful for pyra. now if you'll pardon me i need to part with $35...
posted by boogah (32 comments total)

I like it. Thumbs up.
posted by Jako at 3:30 PM on January 25, 2002

It's about time. Yes, as much as people hate paying for services online the webmasters need the money.
posted by Aikido at 3:32 PM on January 25, 2002

For anyone who's interested, there was a previous discussion here before the official announcement was made, which discusses many of the features.
posted by walrus at 3:39 PM on January 25, 2002

[apologies if this is considered a double post.]
posted by boogah at 3:54 PM on January 25, 2002

I got my Blogger sticker pack when they did the $10 emergency fund to buy another server and even though I'm not really thrilled with with features upgrades, I think Ev will get my $35 anyway. Glitches and downtime included, the folks at Blogger have done a great job with what they have to work with. All in all, it's certainly saved me more than $35 by wasting my time at home instead of going out for a few cold ones!
posted by RevGreg at 3:55 PM on January 25, 2002

I think Blogger Pro's a good product and worth the money. The only lament I have is that it wasn't around sooner. Congrats to Ev for resurrecting and launching it, and congrats to the ex-Pyrates for helping to build a wonderful tool. You've all got a lot to be proud of.
posted by anildash at 4:16 PM on January 25, 2002

Sadly, I don't see comments in this release. I was hoping for that...I know there are other methods (yaccs, etc.) but it would have been nice to have them all under one hood. Also, a lack of categories/organizational method other than time is a bit of a bummer. BUT...still as always kudos and I'll support it.
posted by ltracey at 4:20 PM on January 25, 2002

It's not a double post. I was just pointing out the other one for information.
posted by walrus at 4:25 PM on January 25, 2002

msg i got visiting the blogger pro site:

Also: Before you read on and then get annoyed later, we notice you're using a browser other than IE. If you're not able to use Internet Explorer 5.x+ on Windows or Macintosh, Blogger Pro won't work for you yet. This is because we are building a new, more robust interface (which will support all newish mostly standards-compliant browsers), so we can't afford to invest in multiple versions of the interim interface. Sorry.

Unless you are on Unix or Linux, it should be free and easy for you to upgrade your browser (and you'll be glad you did).

thanks for the tip, but i consider IE a downgrade compared to Mozilla. best of luck though! i'm sure it'll work in Mozilla one day.
posted by deftone at 4:31 PM on January 25, 2002

I wonder what doesn't work. I've used Mozilla for several months now on regular Blogger, and while there were glitches here and there, as of 0.9.7 it works almost flawlessly.
posted by dhartung at 4:41 PM on January 25, 2002

Sadly, I don't see comments in this release.

Sadly, comments can be relatively server intensive. Just ask any of the free comment services that have shut down over the past few months. I think that if anyone is interested enough in comments, it wouldn't kill you to pony up the $10 a month (give or take) to rent server space. I use dotcomments and it works great - although the project seems to have been more or less abandoned at this point.
posted by RevGreg at 4:41 PM on January 25, 2002

So.....pardon me for being a goober here, but when I pay for Blogger Pro, my site remains essentially the same, no lost info, but more features?
posted by Kafkaesque at 4:55 PM on January 25, 2002

Well, I'm happily signed up with blogger pro, for the same reasons I buy younger blogger's blogspot ads. (Yes: children ARE the future). But I'm not thrilled about this 100K a month posting limit. Three dollars to buy in an extra 100K, even if you only use 1K of it? According to their cute little posting analyzer, I'll be paying 6 dollars a month extra. That's just... not so fresh.
posted by RJ Reynolds at 4:58 PM on January 25, 2002

But how do I sign up?

Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page? Come on...

There should be a big fucking "Click here to give me your money and start using Blogger Pro!" button right at the top of the page.
posted by jkottke at 5:50 PM on January 25, 2002

i can see what you're saying, and from a usability at least a "register now" in the right column perhaps in that nice bright blogger orange would be nice.
posted by boogah at 6:21 PM on January 25, 2002

Wow! How totally unimpressive.
posted by benbrown at 6:43 PM on January 25, 2002

That may or may not be a sarcastic remark, but it's true all the same. Too little, too late.
posted by donkeyschlong at 7:09 PM on January 25, 2002

Looks interesting enough. As someone said, surprised some sort of comments mechanism wasn't included. The other thing is the upload file thing... not sure how that would work, suppose it would just send the file to the blogger server temporarily, then the blogger server would send the file to your server, and then purge the file. Question is, is Ev counting that impact into his traffic quota. What if someone posts 1000 pictures per month, but only posts links to the pictures with no content. They will be highly utilizing the server resources while staying under the post size limits.

I switched over to MovableType myself, and am hesitant to move back. The other thing I noticed was the lack of multiple templates. If I want content from one blog to appear on 3 seperate pages with 3 seperate formats, that is easy enough with server side products like MovableType. With Blogger Pro it's not possible. (For example, my 'projects' page lists all my projects, with their last update date. That date is simply an include of a seperate template that just shows the date of the last post I entered.)

It's close... but still needs a few tweaks before it will be the best game in town for everyone.
posted by benjh at 7:31 PM on January 25, 2002

My only complaint is the payment method. Why can't I purchase this directly without going through PayPal?

I've had nothing but problems with that service and would appreciate being able to avoid it.
posted by revbrian at 9:36 PM on January 25, 2002

I am disappointed. They've moved too slowly and rewarded the wait with too little. There was a time when Blogger's servers were down all the time, it was impossible to post etc.... *that* would have been a clever time to launch Blogger Pro. Now I'm looking at the features and trying to find one that I really, really want (eg comments, better archiving) and it's not there. Is that all there is to Blogger?
posted by skylar at 3:06 AM on January 26, 2002

Give it some time. I've been with Blogger pretty much since the beginning, and I know that many of these features were available for some people to test over a year ago. I'm impressed by them rolling out the pay-for service at all. $35 is nothing, as far as I'm concerned, for the help Blogger has given me over the years - and if I remain more excited by what is to come than what we've received so far - that still doesn't stop me looking forward.

In the meantime, as a non-tech person, even though I can set up Moveable Type and run it (and indeed do at plasticbag.org) I'm ALWAYS going to be nervous about something happening to the database that I don't understand. At least with Blogger I've got people on hand to worry about it FOR me.
posted by barbelith at 3:54 AM on January 26, 2002

Give it some time. I've been with Blogger pretty much since the beginning, and I know that many of these features were available for some people to test over a year ago. I'm impressed by them rolling out the pay-for service at all. $35 is nothing, as far as I'm concerned, for the help Blogger has given me over the years - and if I remain more excited by what is to come than what we've received so far - that still doesn't stop me looking forward.

In the meantime, as a non-tech person, even though I can set up Moveable Type and run it (and indeed do at plasticbag.org) I'm ALWAYS going to be nervous about something happening to the database that I don't understand. At least with Blogger I've got people on hand to worry about it FOR me.
posted by barbelith at 3:55 AM on January 26, 2002

Blogger Pro is a joke in my opinion. They want to charge you $35 now, $50 as soon as all the features come out? What? And lets look at some of the "features" shall we? Better Archiving System? They know the current archiving system is horrible (at least in my experience) with archives suddenly missing and what not. They fix it and tell me its a feature? This is too little too late in my opinion. If you want a tool similar to blogger pro, but better and cheaper, why not try www.bigblogtool.com as their service is only $20 a year with better options.
posted by thebwit at 6:10 AM on January 26, 2002

Wow. Blogger Pro contains all the features currently available (for free) in CMSs like Movable Type. And less.

There's nothing to see hear. Move along, move along.
posted by dogmatic at 6:54 AM on January 26, 2002

why not try www.bigblogtool.com as their service is only $20 a year with better options.

Say thebwit, you wouldn't happen to be the same Brent Todd that owns bigblogtool.com, would ya? No, that must be an impossible coincidence.

If you're going to hawk your own product (and claim that it's "their" service), at least have the decency to be upfront about it. There's no reason to hide your involvement, nor talk in the third person about yourself.
posted by mathowie at 12:04 PM on January 26, 2002

Actually it isn't my service. The person who runs the service is Russ of Big Guy Media. I just happen to be a customer who uses it.
posted by thebwit at 12:25 PM on January 26, 2002

And you own the domain? That's odd.
posted by mathowie at 12:26 PM on January 26, 2002

I guess they don't call it Blog "Tool" for nothing.
posted by Kafkaesque at 12:42 PM on January 26, 2002

Yes, I work for LiveJournal. Still, at the risk of pissing people off...

Blogger's new paid features:
Spellchecking - Previously free on Blogger. Free on LiveJournal.
Subject / Title Fields - Free on LiveJournal.
Image Posting - Free on LiveJournal. Automated within the software clients.
Internationalization - Free to all users. Numerous foriegn languages supported currently on LJ, free improved UTF-8 internationalization coming soon.
Paid Service - $25 a year for LJ, with no plans for price increase. $35 for Blogger with plans of increase to $50.

Blogger still doesn't provide free commenting, free RSS feeds, free dynamically generated lists of all your friends latest posts, directory services, etc. The reason for this is because these are database intensive functions. Blogger is really not a very database intensive service, however. That is both a blessing and a curse.

It is easier for LiveJournal to support features (such as remote site hosting or improved style editing, for example) than it is for Blogger to add features such as commenting or dynamically generated friends lists. Doing so would require a lot of work and numerous servers.

On the other hand, LiveJournal has been victims of its own complexity at times. We've had to slow down growth in order to redesign our server infrastructure. We are in the finishing stages of doing so now, and it will make things much faster and more scalable than before.

Still, despite its shortcomings, I still think that Blogger Pro is a good idea. It should eventually provide Blogger with a good recurring revenue source, which is something they've needed for a long time now.
posted by insomnia_lj at 12:49 PM on January 26, 2002

For Clarification:

I own BigBlogTool.

Brent was nice enough to register the domain for me as gift when when I wanted to move domains. Brent is just a happy customer.

Do you greet all your new commentors with such a welcoming smile?

Anyways, I'm of the opinion that there still isnt one tool that meets all the needs of everyone and I include the new blogger pro in that, as well as bigblogtool. Each system has its limits and its drawbacks. It should be a matter of figuring out whats important to you as a blogger and choosing the product that best meets that.

:)
posted by ruzz at 3:04 PM on January 26, 2002

ruzz and thebwit, keep in mind that self-promotion is a dicey subject here, and in the past many people have gone out of their way to hide their connections to products they've talked up.

So seeing a user that owns the domain of the thing they're endorsing is an obvious conflict of interest and threw up a red flag for me. It appears it was just a misunderstanding, and he doesn't own the service though he owns the domain. Sorry to imply anything else.
posted by mathowie at 3:26 PM on January 26, 2002

I can see the conflict there and I can see completely what you're saying. I really should get on transfering that domain ownership i guess :)
posted by ruzz at 4:41 PM on January 26, 2002