In the quest to locate new blogging platforms today I came across a new one located at my.telegraph.co.uk. I don’t read the telegraph I was just meandering about the supermarket looking for a paper and saw this bit at the top of the paper and thought I should try it.
Review of my.telegraph.co.uk
I was greeted with a simple enough account creation process it asked for my name, email twice and password twice and asked me to upload an image to go with my account. So far so good until I found that I could only upload a jpg or jpeg file as the avatar for the account – which was a bit of a pain. Allowing gif and png formats would have been better but not a huge gripe.
Writing the post was simple – write a headline and write the post. Here I was a bit less happy, to make it useable by all you cant edit code. The system does not put in an H1 tag and you cant structure it effectively with headings – you can insert lists I suppose but is a little weak but is really simple to use. So I tried to add some links by way of seeing how the interface works for this and I couldn’t submit the links easily – the window corrupts in firefox. So after working out that the submit button was the tiny line to the bottom right of the window it became workable, had to be pixel perfect with the clicks but I’ve seen worse.
You then submit the post and you are asked to tag the posts. Simple to use drop down – not long enough and lacking in options for anyone who really wants good categorization but is useful enough for normal posts. The you can add your own tags – enter them into a text line input and separate these with commas which is usable enough.
Click on the publish button and your live.
You can’t add a blog roll, outputted code is weak
my.telegraph.co.uk – Good or Bad platform
For me its a weak platform for the new blogger who is looking to dive in for the first time. Its simple to sign up and is simple to create a basic post – embedding links in firefox is a bit of a nightmare but you cant have it all. The outputted text is not coded with search engines in mind – hx tags are used for formatting so the ranking possibilities are reduced. But all in all of you want a simple to use, effective blog, and use Internet Explorer have a go.
For me its not flexible enough and doesn’t allow me the control I want. Let me know your thoughts through the comments and I’ll re-blog about it.
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