It’s an unavoidable issue to consider the usage of your native language in a blog website if you do seriously think about making blog a dispensable part of your daily life. When you have the impulse to say something, you always want to say it right with certain degrees of freedom that allows you play with your language; if you are lazy to speak up, it’s more important that you can at least manage something you are really familiar with and would not become more passive when you realise your lack of ability saying something exactly the same as how you think. However, it’s cool to have a pure English blog site. It’s a matter of being closer to this world.
- www.yourblog.org – I guess it was the first Chinese blog I tried in the Internet, but sad to say it apparently would not be my last one to hold on. Nice layout and easily operatable interface leaves you no barrier to access every possible function to make the best use of this website. And they do have some good templates although sometime they look a little bit reductant and over-garnish that would take a long time to load in. There is no way to hide your whole website, but you can choose publish the individual entry privately which means you have to operate this function separately when you blog something each times. The reason made me finally give up this website was the strict censor system they’ve got. It’s too much for a blogger who wants to have some fun through writing. Actually you can not say anything that has anything to do with the current political affairs or social issues. Even you really don’t have an intention to do so, you still can not use those sensitive words that relates to such topics. Sometime you feel so frustrated when you experience so many times uploading failures. You don’t know which exactly the vocabulary in these 2000 or 3000 words goes wrong and it’s impossible for you to go through every word you have written, then you say “okay off I go”.
- Sina Blog – It’s another Chinese blog hosted by the biggest Chinese Internet gateway. I just started to make a bit sense yesterday. It’s a good one and the tech it applies is pretty close to those currently popular English blog websites. They almost have everything what a modern blog website would take. Profile photo, bulletin board, blog category management, photo album and good Chinese formatting display…..they even are trying to develop some background music that is the last thing of the Internet I could bear. The bad aspect is from the control panel which is quite hard to understand why they look like that and it’s also hard to operate. The Module Setting is set aside as a separate unit with 3 chubby and stupid buttons on the left column of the Control Panel, which looks pretty bizarre. I just don’t understand why they would do that. Anyway, you will very easily get yourself lost in the repeatedly popping-up windows which have exactly the same content inside. You have to jump up and down among windows and keep closing the unnecessary ones which is a tiresome enough job to maintain your good mood to stay in there. By the way, Sina Blog have many celebrities’ blogs which I think a very disgusting trick to seduce the public but has nothing to do with the true blog spirit.
- ModBlog – I found this one through Google search by accident. It happened after I failed to like yourblog.org and during the worst time when I was finding a new job. It gave me a space to say something in English without any hesitation because it has open permission function which I chose to only open my website to the nominated friends in my list. It was a totally brand-new experience for me to blog in there, getting everything beautifully laid out and 80% controlling the style I could picture. They do have very simple and beautiful templates until lately I found from the Notice Board that this function has been currently down for quite a while and doesn’t have any sign to get well soon. After all it’s just a small website and there are no such big hosts like Google or Microsoft behind it. As a result, you can not expect too much and count on its stable performance all the time. This blog doesn’t support Chinese at all. If you input Chinese Characters, it will give you some strange things. Don’t be surprised when you see that.
- Square Space – You will always get this one when you do a search work in Google (I don’t know why. Maybe Square Space is Google’s nephew), and you would always try to get in it, but you will always put it in the last place in your blog sites collection. It gives you nothing special except 30 days trial period and isolated feelings when you are blogging something. You can not see a connection between your blog and others, and it feels like you are doing a beginner’s website in the FrontPage. It’s so boring that after 10 minutes later you even can hardly keep your eyes open. Well…Shut the site down and go to sleep though! The introductory page of this website gives you lots of beautiful samples showing how attractive this blog site is. Unfortunately it would not happen on you unless you are very knowledgeable about HTML composing. I guess I am dumb, so this is not my place at all. Well….it supports Chinese but the display is poor.
-Blogger Team – The domain colour of Blogger Team is red which drives you nuts, but the actual blog site is very simple. Chinese characters work all right in there but format is also unbearably ugly. There are some bugs with certain template. You’ve got strange codes under the body text. The templates are much better than Square Space, but it still can not give you the confidence that the website will last long and will further develop.
- MSN Space – A perfect compatibility of both English and Chinese. Slide-show of photo album is the coolest feature I have ever seen in a blog site. Email posting function is amazing. Instant modules dragging and moving is easy to handle. You’ve got three levels to set a permission list to decide who can see your blog site. Everything is good except the storage space is only 30 MB and Ad banner on the top of the web looks stupid. As for the category management, you can add a category only when you are publishing a new entry; you can not add an empty category in a management panel. However, it’s not a big deal since categories are supposed to exist only when there is something in them. I guess I do like this blog…..if I wasn’t told about Blogger or Blog Spot.
- Blog Spot or maybe Blogger – It’s not my fault to have been away from this site for such a long time. The black background my husband set misled me to the wrong direction and has been giving me a very unpleasant feeling about this blog. I though it was the end of the world until yesterday we found otherwise. Well you can change lots of things in there although it all starts from a very tiny pencil symbol beside one of your blog entries. It’s a bit little late to realize what you have missed in the past one year without this blog site, but it is never too late to find the fact that you can change something in your life. David is trying to convince me being with this blog site provided by the most successful Internet developer Google. He even showed me some good blog sites from other people. I was really moved. When you see them, you know there is no mystery inside and you can easily make an equally good one as theirs. So, give it a go! Before the final decision, several things need to be confirmed further in this blog site: The display of Chinese characters; the category management function and the gallery feature. Their templates are good (except the black one) and plenty enough to choose from. They don’t surprise you, and the simplest is the best.
