13 Oct 2013

Blogger Titans Interview #1 : Andy Page

SYB : Since When have you been using Blogger and what has been your experience with it so far ?

AP : Been using Blogger since around 2005 when I started the LOST Site, DarkUFO (darkufo.blogspot.com).

I really enjoy using it find it’s a fantastic way to create a web presence with 0 cost.

The Blogger servers are very fast and reliable and can handle any huge spikes in traffic. As they are hosted on Google Servers they are available worldwide and we don’t have to worry about any server issues, hacking etc. It allows us to concentrate on making posts and articles rather than fixing server issues.

Being a Blogger Top Contributor, what does a normal day look like ?

Basically I first check each morning to see if any of the support tickets that I'm working on have been updated/replied to. If so I go through and work on those posts.

After that I check to see if there appears to be any wide scale outage or issues affecting lots of users.

Finally I look at any new support tickets that have not been replied to by other TC’s.

Advantages
- Free
- Fast
- Unlimited Bandwidth and a huge amount of space for Photos and Videos
- Ability to Customize the full template
- Managed Security
- Very Reliable, 99.9% up-time.
- Deep integration with other Google Products, eg. G+, Photos etc

Disadvantages
- Can only have 100 Max Authors
- Can only add 20 Labels Max to a post
- No built in Author Profiles

I don't see it changing that much to be honest. I think we’ll see lots of small incremental improvements. I hope that we get to see some of the following.

- New and Improved Templates
- Provide Templates that provide the ability to easily make a blog be responsive.
- Improved G+ Comments
- Improvements to the Android and iOS apps.

Here are a couple of things I would like to see.

- Provide a new level of Security access. Currently we have Reader, Author and Admin. A new level would be Editor. An Editor would be able to edit existing posts but not be able to make any Admin Changes.

- I would also like to see a Special Level of Security called “Owner”. Only the Owner can add and remove Admins. It would stop rouge admins from deleting other admins.

- Categories , I would love to see the introduction of Categories into Blogger. Currently we can only assign Labels to Posts, it would be great to have Categories and that we can use those to remove certain Categories from displaying on the Homepage.

- Improved support for Multi-Author blogs so that Authors can create a custom “footer” for their posts.

- Allow blog owners to have a central place to see all their comments they have left on other sites

- Provide the ability to “undelete” a post or comment that was accidentally deleted.

Personally, No . G+ is great but not for everyone. G+ only has a small subset of features that can be found in Blogger and provides very little customisations.

These things seem to happen from time to time which is unfortunate. Blogger releases new code/fixes/optimisations on a weekly basis. It appears sometimes that bugs slip through the QA Process. Normally they get fixed within a week, or in some cases work-arounds found.

Your site Spoilertv , which has grown tremendously after your LOST fame , is in many ways the best example of what can be achieved using Blogger platform when its taken to the extreme , How have you been able to do that ?

Thanks :)

Lots and lots of hard work and help from a lot of people. I started the site as something to do once LOST was over, and the site just grew slowly. As we grew we added more helpers and writers to help us post content, and reviews.

We expanded the number of shows we covered, added our Episode Database ( www.stvplus.com ) , plus our own Image Gallery ( spoilertv.co.uk/images ).

One of the key things was to build a great community and we use the Disqus commenting system. It really helps us control the spam and keep trolls at bay :)

You can see our About Page here for some stats/info

Very simple really. The amount of traffic we get would mean we would have to purchase a very large and expensive server, along with a monthly bandwidth fees.

Also, I would have learn a whole new templating system and reconfig over 150 RSS Feeds and 50+ twitter accounts.

I just don’t see the benefit in using WordPress over Blogger.

I would love to see more professional themes added to the standard gallery.

Good question. I think mostly because developers have more control and better to understand features in WordPress. Plus developers can charge for their widgets if they want.

Blogger Widgets seem like a bit of an afterthought and not very well supported or easy to create/maintain.

I think Blogger need to make it a little simpler for first time bloggers. eg. Tumblr is very quick and easy to add content. Blogger can sometimes seem a little daunting and over complicated to new users.

But apart from that I really can't think of much. I don't think Blogger will ever overtake WordPress in terms of userbase/ecosystem but I don’t think it needs to. Both can co-exist quite happily.

WordPress is great for some people, whilst Blogger is preferred by others.

We don’t ask for money ;)
darkufo [at-the-rate] spoilertv.com
www.spoilertv.com
plus.google.com/+spoilertv
www.facebook.com/SpoilerTV
spoilertv.tumblr.com