Blogger Beta

I got an invitation to Vox on Friday. Yeah, I know, just what I need - another web community site to suck more of my time up. But... a few good friends who live thousands of miles away are active there, and not active anywhere else I play online these days. So I played around and made a site there.

I had my invitation sent to my gmail account. Blogger is owned by Google, who owns Gmail. And within 24 hours I had gotten an invitation to have my Blogger account expanded to the new Blogger Beta. Coincidence? hmmm...

Anyway, so I've heard that the new and improved Blogger allows tags (or labels, as Blogger calls it). It's something that I've missed - or at least it's been missed by the anal-organizational part of me, the same part of me that loves Google Spreadsheets, although not as much as Excel, and color coded file folders, and sock drawers sorted by lenght and color.

So I played around with the new 'improved' version. And what's the first thing I find out? There is no HTML editing yet in this shiney new beta! Is it just me, or is that a step backwards in flexibility and customization?

Anyway. Meh. I've got my labels, and lost my shiney template.

Vox is pretty nifty, although it has it's own limitations. It' has limited templates as well (is it really that much of a challange to let us add our own html and css to your nice web portals?). It doesn't have a customizeable links page at all, unless you're trying to link to someone on Vox. But it does have a very cool catalog system built right into the site, that lets you keep track of your books, videos, music, and photos. And since Vox is owned by Yahoo!, who also owns Flickr, there's a direct import of your photo's from Flickr.

Which comes in very handy for something else Vox does - the Vox hunt. It's a photo scavanger hunt. Today's is "Take a picture of something striped." My picture of something striped turned out needing a bit of editing, which has to be done on the desktop, and I'm way to comfy in bed with the laptop... so it'll have to wait til tomorrow. But it's a great reminder to break out the camera - and yesterdays Vox hunt was for a "Tall, Cool One" - there were some great pix in that set!

And Vox also does a Question of the Day. Today's was "What was the last wedding you went to? Were you in the wedding?" I wasn't feel particulary creative as I tried to recover from a near-death-experience disguesed as a family get-together, but hey - that question tickled my memory enough to get a few lines out of me.

QotD:
Here Comes The Bride
Aug 19, 2006 at 7:30 PM

What was the last
wedding you went to? Were you in the wedding?
Last one was my baby sis's wedding almost two
years ago! They had the ceremony in a classy ballroom, and
the reception was in the same room immediately after. Great wedding!
Major points for food, bar, music, and all the family making it to the event
with no drama.
Bonus points for the 3 year old that got
'lost' and started a security lockdown of the entire hotel and galleria who was
found 10 minutes later going potty.

I'm not trying to make anyone link-surf here. In fact, I'll probably make a habit of posting my Vox info here - I'm making the effort to stay connected to my friends over there, but I'm not making anyone follow me around the web ;)

Hope you're having a good weekend! And if you'd like to give Vox a try, leave me a comment or send me an email - I've got a few invites to give out.