Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Well, it seems that my blog host, Blog City, is finally releasing the next version of the software. This is the first big overhaul in a year or perhaps a bit more and was originally scheduled for the beginning of the year, but I guess BC wanted to make good and sure that everything would work with little or no problem. For the last big release I remember that we were down for around a week, give or take! But this time it’s only supposed to be for a couple of hours early Monday morning, June 6. But you never know, there could be some additional downtime.

From what we hear, this new version is going to be chock full of all kinds of cool new features and enhancements, and I hope to implement a lot of these as well as do some redesigning of the site to improve legibility. Thanks for your patience if this takes longer than expected. In the mean time you might want to check out Blog City yourself if you have a blog or are thinking of creating one. Like Blogger they have both a free version as well as a subscription-based one, but the subscription fee is pretty nominal especially if you sign up for a year. And their features, as far as I can tell, are much more even with the current version, than what Blogger offers.

Of course you can also host your blog somewhere that sets you up with Moveable Type or something similar as well. While I do web development professionaly, personally I opted for something where I didn’t need to get into all kinds of config files and template files to tweak something. BC is driven by a set of adminastrative tools which don’t necessarily involve any coding. However, it’s not quite as easy as a program built from the ground up which hand-holds you through everything. You can also get into the code, but at least with the current version you can’t customize everything you might with something like Moveable Type. In any case, Moveable Type isn’t their competition, I don’t think as much as Blogger, since they similarly treat the user by allowing them to do a lot (but not everything) with an interface that isn’t to cryptic.