I love wordpress! It is my absolute favourite blogging platform, but there seems to be a new platform coming up and about to compete with blogger, movable, typepad, livejournal and yes our very own wordpress. What is this new blogging platform? It is I.PH. A really javascript and ajax heavy blogging platform, which if you ask me I think has really good perks. I’ve already made a new blog on it too, but that is a special blog for Abbey.

To create a blog is terribly easy with I.PH. Just like how google took over blogger and picasa, so that you can integrate them together. I.PH has done the same thing only it’s all within I.PH which i will show in a while. All you need to do when signing up is just pick your desired blogging ID which will become your domain. Abbey’s is http://abbey.i.ph. Sweet simple and terribly short I like that. But bare in mind you have to activate it within that day or at least in the hour, cause when i made another one and didn’t activate it, it became dead and the domain name was available again to others. It will then take you immediately to a dashboard where you can link friends.

From there you can head on to the section where you can upload photos and to your blog. Bad thing if you’d notice is that there is not much of space available 100mb. sheesh you can’t really put much there. But it’ll do for now. I’ve taken up most of that space with just pictures of Abbey.

The photos section is all run under flash and java script if I’m not mistaken. Beauty is when you upload pictures into the albums you can either do so one by one or in one whole bunch. The whole bunch is of course way better. Loading time is extremely fast and I think comparable if not faster than Picasa and Flick’r. Adding captions to it is also a breeze.

The Main page of the photo album

 

The preview page of the photos, which can also be seen as a slideshow

 

Just drag and drop your photos. Immediate add caption by just selecting the picture you want. The blog is fantastic. Ajax surfaced, there is a button that says ‘Turn Edit On’ which will allow certain sections open for editing, very easy to notice. They will point out liners like “Main Header ‘edit image’” or something of the sort. Oh and you can immediately register for your own domain lik http://example.com straight from the sidebar.

Click to see a bigger picture. I have expanded all the menus for your viewing. Best part is you can install plugins that you like straight from the sidebar, you will se it as you scroll down the edit menu for the sidebar. There are a number of fonts for your picking and you can also change the overall template and colour of the blog. So far there aren’t many templates and I haven’t figured out how to edit the look yet. Oh and if you want to add an image to your post, it directly links with your photoalbum. So cool!

But I’m not in favour for the sizes they have. I’d prefer it if they can allow us to edit the resolution of the images our selves. Small is too small , medium is still a tad too small and huge is just too huge! One thing I don’t like though is that they haven’t put in the feature for importing posts from other blogs. I would’ve figured they would’ve put that in first. But its’ still in beta phase so i’ll wait patiently for it. There ya have it. That’s my take on I.PH. I’m loving ti so far, but of course there can be room for improvement.