Plugging plogs.net
If you haven’t already checked out Plogs, I suggest you do so. I have a plog; it’s refreshing to have a more professional-oriented community to post my book reviews in. I like having a separate plog for this, so I can keep at least one thread of my thought process in a more easily searched site. Also, some very good friends of mine started plogs with the idea of building a management infrastructure that works, rather than one that relies on a single individual. If you’ve ever been part of a start-up, you know that a team mindset is what you need to go beyond the initial burn-through capital, and that’s what plogs.net has– a kick-ass team at the helm.
Creating a plog is free, but only paid plogs can post entries (basic plogs can post comments), which keeps rates low and encourages people to use their plogs for more than teenaged angsty whining.
Right now, plogs is having a sale on accounts, which you can read about here, with group rates available and full accounts at just $10/year (that’s the same as 4 months of LiveJournal time).
Update: And no, I will not spam your Friends pages about plogs all the time. Just today, cause there’s a sale and you might want to know about it. 
halfawake wrote:
Maybe its just me, but I fail to see the difference between this and LiveJournal. I mean, there are a few cosmetic differences but it essentially looks like just LiveJournal with more restrictions, and since we all already have LiveJournals, I can’t imagine why we’d want that.
Posted on 29-Apr-03 at 4:47 pm | Permalink
mortaine wrote:
Hmm…. I think that’s because you haven’t run into problems with “upper management.” You also probably don’t surf the “random” link– there’s a lot of noise in LiveJournal. The main difference between plogs and LiveJournal is management technique and a lower volume of pointless journals.
Also, a basic plog has more restrictions (mainly on posting), but a paid plog is cheaper and gives you more, in general, than a paid account on LJ. I’m not saying everyone will want one– but if you’re looking for something other than LiveJournal, it’s a good alternative with a lot fewer teeny-bopperness (on account of, well, fewer teeny-boppers paying for anything online).
Posted on 30-Apr-03 at 12:58 am | Permalink
halfawake wrote:
I tend to ignore “upper management” for the most part, with good reason from what little I’ve seen of it. I do use the random link occasionally, but not too often because I think it isn’t a great way to find people that way - because it is random. Also, I think its really hard to define a “pointless” journal. Everyone’s definition of a pointless journal is probably different, someone may think my journal or yours is pointless, but that doesn’t mean it is.
I have had LiveJournal for almost a year now, and I know several people on it. I don’t think its perfect by any means, but I can put up with what I don’t like about it, my friends are here so I don’t see much of a point in going elsewhere. Besides, you may be right about there being a lot of “teeny-boppers” on LiveJournal, but its fairly simple to ignore them.
Posted on 30-Apr-03 at 6:07 am | Permalink
halfawake wrote:
Hmm. I’ve actually been rethinking this recently and am seriously considering getting a paid plogs account. I have just one question and since you use it, I thought I’d ask you. How fast/reliable has it been? This is actually one reason I’ve gotten more interested in it lately, since LiveJournal seems to have been getting a lot less reliable lately.
Posted on 21-May-03 at 7:11 am | Permalink
mortaine wrote:
It’s been very reliable. When there’s been a problem, Mark and Chris have fixed it very quickly. There are some weird code quirks right now, but they’re all interface-related (minor things like links that go to livejournal.com instead of plogs.net, or referring to a “Friends Page” instead of a “Watched List”), and they’re all due to a code rollback that happened a couple of days ago; shouldn’t be long before we hunt them all down and get rid of them. They’re in no way as vast as the headaches LJ had yesterday.
You can see maintenance updates here: http://www.plogs.net/community/pl_maintenance/ to get an idea of downtimes. Generally speaking, it’s been an hour or two at a time. The plogs servers are not under heavy load the way LJ’s servers are, so they’re quite fast, from my experience.
You could create a basic account first, which would let you read/comment, but not post entries, just to test out the server speed. For a limited time, you can also request a 2-week trial Paid Account, which would let you test out the paid features before throwing any money down.
Posted on 21-May-03 at 7:36 am | Permalink
halfawake wrote:
I imagine the headaches they have aren’t any where near LiveJournal’s considering that Plogs.net has a little over 1500 users, which is no where near LiveJournal’s 1 million plus users.
I got an account there last night. Been testing it out since then. I use the same name there that I do here. I was just curious of your opinion, since you’ve used it for a while now. Thanks for the information.
Posted on 21-May-03 at 8:04 am | Permalink