ryan kennedy’s blog

A little over a week ago I purchased the D-Link DSM-320RD Wireless Media Player. I had 2 goals in mind with this device:

1. I wanted to be able to listen to my music tracks from Yahoo! Music Unlimited anywhere in the house, including places I don’t have a PC.
2. I wanted to be able to watch videos stored on my PC on my nice, 55″ television without having to lug a computer into my living room.

The D-Link is able to do both of these things, so I figured it was a match made in heaven. In addition, the 320RD comes with a built-in DVD player, meaning I could get rid of my old DVD player and save a set of inputs on the television.

Pricing and Availability

First, I couldn’t find the D-Link devices at my local Best Buy (those guys continually fail me when it comes to inventory of anything I want). So I set out to the last place I wanted to go…I went to Fry’s. Amazingly, they had it in stock for under $300. They also had the little brother, the DSM-320 (identical except it doesn’t have a DVD player or card reader) for just under $200. I snagged one and brought it home.

Setup

One nice thing about the D-Link is that it has both 802.11g and ethernet. I used the wired ethernet for my setup, but I did try out the wireless. I had an issue with the D-Link detecting my media shares over the network on wireless. I’m guessing there was some bridging funkiness going on with my router that wasn’t passing some multicast packets between the wired and wireless networks. I switched to the wired ethernet and the detection worked much better.

The setup interface is a bit clunky. I had a hard time stumbling through the wireless setup just because setting up a connection to a particular SSID isn’t intuitive, especially when you have SSID broadcast turned off on your access point.

D-Link ships with it’s media sharing software to install on the PC. It’s not great, but it gets the job done. One annoying thing is that it doesn’t monitor the filesystem constantly for new content. You either have to refresh the media database by hand or schedule it to run periodically. Additionally, you can use Windows Media Connect (WMC, Microsoft’s UPnP AV server) to share content. Both the D-Link and WMC will share audio, video and photos…though each is a little different (I’ll get into this more later).

Remote

The remote on this thing flat out sucks. I’m not even talking about the button layout (which is bad, but not terrible), I’m just talking about how well it works. In my experience, if I wasn’t pointing the remote EXACTLY at the IR receiver on the box, it didn’t pick up keypresses. An RF remote would have been a welcome addition.

Also, the remote won’t control the television…just the D-Link. That means you have no choice but to use 2 remotes. This is a little annoying after using a TiVo/Comcast/DirecTV remote that will control both the television and the box. While the D-Link remote does have a volume control, it controls the volume output from the box independently from the television. So you could have the volume at full blast on the box, but if the television volume is turned down you won’t be able to hear it. I always hate how on my PC there’s about 3 different places to control the volume for any given application, so this really irritated me.

Music Playback

Music playback was by far the most important draw of the D-Link. I use the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service and my wife and I like to listen to music while we’re playing games at the table. First, the D-Link will NOT play back DRM’d music out of the box. The D-Link software will make the songs available to the box, but the box cannot play back copy protected music. In order to play back the DRM’d tracks, you have to pull the song through Windows Media Connect.

The D-Link box will only talk to one media share on the network at a time. So if you have both the D-Link software and Windows Media Conect running at the same time, you have to tell the box which to talk to. THIS SUCKS. You have to go into a setup menu, autodetect the shares on the network and then select the right one. You also have to make sure that the PC you’re trying to connect to has authorized the D-Link to use WMC. I’ve seen WMC frequently forget what devices have been authorized, forcing me to reauthorize the device.

When you finally get the WMC connection all set up, it plays music like a champ. You can shuffle, repeat, fast forward, skip, play, pause and more. Sadly, the D-Link has a screen saver but it doesn’t seem to want to switch on as long as any music is being played back. This especially sucks as I have a rear projection television that is prone to burn-in. The screensaver kicks in fine if the box is idling on one of the menu screens, but as long as it’s doing ANYTHING it will not kick over to the screen saver. The music playback screen is very static, so it’s a sure thing that if I listen to music for several hours I’m going to end up with some nasty burn-in.

Video Playback

Video playback makes it possible for me to watch recorded television programs from my PC on my television. I have a TV tuner card in my PC and it acts as a backup to my TiVo for whenever I have a scheduling conflict. So having a device that would allow me to watch the shows on my TV without having to transfer them to a DVD is key.

Sadly, WMC does a shitty job of playing back video. As it turns out, you can’t fast forward anything served up by WMC. That means no commercial skipping. The D-Link software does allow shared video to be fast forwarded. Unfortunately, that means you have to go into the setup menu and switch the D-Link to communicate with their software instead of with WMC. This is lame.

I also noticed that even over a 100 megabit network that there are severe compression artifacts during scenes with any amount of motion (chase scenes, for instance). Watching the network utilization, it’s clear that the network isn’t a bottleneck. I’m not sure if it’s the sharing software or the box itself, but it sucks. This was an MPEG2 stream, it would be interesting to try other video formats and see if the problem persists. But seeing as how MPEG2 is what my TV capture card records in, not doing that format well is a total bummer.

One nice thing about the box is that you can play back video stored on a CF/SD/MMC card. This is handy, but in no way offsets the amount of suck involved in playing something back over the network.

Photo Viewing

Photo viewing is fine, about as good as the photo viewer on the TiVo. I didn’t really play around with this much since audio and video were much more important to me.

Verdict

This box is a certifiable piece of shit. I actually just returned it today. The issues with the software and having to switch between 2 sharing methods (D-Link’s software and WMC) are absolutely stupid. Would it have killed D-Link to make the box able to aggregate multiple media servers? The video playback issues make me want to gouge my eyes out. The screensaver issue when listening to music leaves me afraid to listen to music on my television. The device shows promise, maybe this is still the early adopter phase and I’m just expecting too much too soon. But for $300 I’d expect it to be a hell of a lot better than it was.

At this point I’m thinking a more expensive, custom Windows Media Center PC is the way to go. Since it’s a Microsoft-based PC it won’t have any issues playing back DRM’d music files and I’ve never had an issue playing back video on my PCs in the house, even if it was over the network.

One of the benefits of having Comcast Video on Demand now is that I can go back and see old episodes of the series put out by the premium cable channels. Last weekend I started watching Entourage, made by HBO. Comcast had the eight episodes from the first season and I got through six of those by Sunday. Tonight I watched the last two from the first season and the first one from this season.

I’m not sure why, but I really enjoy it. The characters are likable. Jeremy Piven (”Droz” from one of my favorite movies, PCU) plays an awesome Hollywood agent named Ari. His humor lends perfectly to the character. I also love Kevin Dillon as “Drama”, an out of work actor who chases loose women and new parts in the search of revitalizing his career.

If you have video on demand and HBO, I totally recommend watching a couple episodes to see if you like it. There’s a couple of funny cameos by Gary Busey and there’s always other stars making brief cameos: Mark Wahlberg (also the executive producer of the show), Ali Larter, Jessica Alba, David Faustino, Luke Wilson, Jimmy Kimmel, Val Kilmer (plays a stoned, Hollywood sherpa dope dealer) and Scarlett Johansson.

Comcast finally got around to rolling out video on demand in my neighborhood. I started playing with it last night. They never actually told me it was now available, but a window popped up while I was watching television saying something like, “available on video on demand.”

So what is it? Try to imagine a rather large TiVo running back at Comcast. You can access that TiVo from your Comcast set top box. On the TiVo you’ll find some free movies, some pay per view movies, some movies and shows from the premium channels (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz) and other assorted programming. You can pick whatever you want to watch from the available content. It’s then streamed to your set top box immediately. This is nice for movies because you pick the start time. No more wading through the guide looking for the next run of the pay per view or premium channel movie you want to see. Just pick it and watch.

Even better, just like a TiVo you can pause, rewind and fast forward any video on demand content. If you decide to stop whatever you’re currently watching, it goes in your saved list so you can resume it later. I started watching The Chronicles of Riddick last night. I fell asleep on the couch, woke up and stopped the movie. When I woke up, I came back out to the television, went to saved programs and resumed the movie from where I left off. It looks like it only keeps saved info for up to 24 hours. I’m not sure why it’s so short, it would seem like they could easily get away with making that longer.

What I Like:

If you miss your favorite show on a premium channel, you can go back and see it. HBO, for instance, makes back episodes of the Sopranos available (not all of them, I’m not sure how far back it goes…but I know it’s not all the way back).

I have a HD set top box and it appears that I’m receiving HD movies. Riddick appeared to be in HD, anyway. More HD is always better.

The DVR-like controls (pause, rewind and fast forward) are killer features. When you consider the technology of what’s going on, it’s also quite remarkable.

What I Don’t Like:

Programming is limited. There’s some old, free movies you can watch. There’s pay per view. There’s programming from the 4 premium channels. But there’s no network or basic cable programming available for the most part. It looks like Discovery has some stuff, but that’s definitely not the norm. You’re not going to find back episodes of CSI, for instance.

You’re going to have a hell of a time if you’re using a TiVo hooked up to the set top box. You’ll have to use the remote that came with the cable box to access the video on demand bits. That means you’ll be changing channels on the cable box without letting the TiVo know. Awkwardness ensues.

The limited amount of time they give you on saved programs. I’m assuming all that’s really contained in the save information is the ID of the content and an offset indicating the resume point. It’s not like that’s a huge amount of information. Give me a week to keep that information.

This is a spoiler free review. Last night Lisa and I dorked it out with hundreds of other people at a midnight showing of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. I really thought Episode I and Episode II were pretty bad, so I was desperately hoping Lucas would get Episode III right.

Things I Liked:

As usual, the digital effects were great. Yoda gets some more action scenes and the green Jedi doesn’t disappoint. Even R2-D2 sees some action. It’s great to see the little guys kick some butt.

The thing I liked most about Episode III, though, was how everything was tied back together. They explain why there are so few Jedi left in Episode IV. They explain why the Emperor is a shriveled prune in Episode VI. They explain why Darth Vader wears the black suit and helmet. They explain why Obi Wan just happens to be on the same planet as Luke in Episode IV. Sadly there’s no tie-in for Han Solo.

Things I Didn’t Like:

The dialog is still very wooden. You’d think after 5 movies someone would have taken the script away from Lucas and breathed some life into it. Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor are great actors, but the dialog they’re given makes it seem as though they’re reading from a teleprompter.

The Wookie tie in was kind of, enh. I’m not sure how it served the movie other than to say, “look…Chewbaca didn’t come from Endor.” I suppose every 3rd episode needs furry, brown creatures.

Overall I really liked the movie. I want to go back and see it again. We were a little close to the screen, making it difficult to take in all of the action scenes. Also, it was late, so my memory of everything is already a little fuzzy.

I mentioned Orb a little while ago. Today I finally got to take it for a more real-life test drive. The screenshot on the right shows the http://my.orb.com/ application along with Windows Media Player. In the screenshot, you can see WMP playing the NCAA Finals. It’s actually showing it live, streamed straight from my cable connection via my Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250.

From work I get a very nice 300-500kbps stream. Video is clear, has a good framerate and the audio sounds as good as it does when I’m sitting in my living room. Even with WMP expanded to full screen, the picture looks decent. It’s obviously not HDTV, but considering the feat of networking going on, it looks pretty good.

From my mom’s house it’s another story. I get about 100kbps. At this point, compression artifacts start making the video look pretty bad. The framerate is fine, but you get lots of fuzzies when the picture is moving. Audio still sounds great, so if you just want to listen to a sporting event or the news it’ll work fine. Sitcoms are okay as long as you’re willing to put up with the artifacts.

In all, I think Orb is pretty sweet. Consider that it’s free to use (and still ad-free for the time being) and you really can’t complain at all. There are some things I would love to see in future versions of Orb, though:

• A standalone version that doesn’t require me to connect to the Orb website. I have a static IP and know enough about networking to configure my firewall that I really shouldn’t have to go through Orb’s website. I’m sure it would also reduce Orb’s bandwidth costs considerably.
• I’ve no idea what form the ads will take in the future, but let me pay some money to get out of having to see ads. I’ll pay for Orb Premium if it means I can have no ads and don’t have to go to Orb’s website.
• Support for DRM’d content. I have video from TiVo ToGo and music from a Napster-like service, all of which is protected by DRM that WMP is able to play back locally. Figure out some way for me to also be able to play it back remotely.
• Being able to search TV listings. Unless I’m missing something, it would appear you can only search TV listings by paging through the guide. When I’m looking to set up a recording in the future, it would be much easier to type in the show name and search for it.
• Along the lines of scheduling recordings, it would be nice to be able to set up and maintain recurring recordings (similar to TiVo’s season pass).

This is a spoiler-free review of Sin City.

Lisa and I went to see Sin City last night. I had never read the graphic novels it was based on, so I didn’t know what to expect aside from what I’d seen on the movie trailers. Director Robert Rodriguez had a very unique take on the comic book style that translated well to the screen. This was not a comic made into a movie, like Batman or Superman. This was a movie made to make viewers feel like they were watching the comic come to life. The characters are great, with lots of over-the-top lines that would wreck a movie if you didn’t understand it was coming from a comic.

The movie recounts the lives and experiences of several people in Sin City. The city, aptly named, is a hotbed for mob crime, murder, corruption and legalized prostitution. The characters are broken into 3 individual storylines, each briefly overlapping with the others.

I thought it was very enjoyable, although a little long (2 hours, 6 minutes). Characters are well developed, so you can understand what’s happening without having read the novels. It’s quite gruesome at times (blood and dismemberment) and there’s brief nudity, so think twice about bringing the kids.

Russ posted today about Orb going free. First, I had never even heard of Orb. So I went to see what they were all about. Here’s the gist of it. You install their application on your Windows machine. It makes your videos, music, photos AND television available on any network enabled device. That includes another computer, your PDA or your cellphone.

So you get the software installed on your machine. If you have a TV tuner card, you give it your zip code and it lets you select your TV provider. It then grabs the listings for your provider. From there, you can log into the web interface. On the web interface, you can tune into any available channel and watch it using Windows Media Player. Alternatively, you can tell Orb’s built-in DVR to record something. When it’s done recording, you can view it later through a similar mechanism.

This is totally perfect for me. I work away from home 3 days a week. During those days, I don’t get to see much television. With Orb, I could watch my television remotely. Nothing on? Watch something you recorded earlier. Nothing you recorded? Watch some video you downloaded or ripped from a DVD. Orb will even do speed detection of your connection to determine what quality of stream it can get to you without dropping frames. I’ve only tested this at home, so it’s unclear what quality I can expect when I’m away from home. But anything is better than nothing.

And it’s dead simple to install. Just download the executable and run it. I didn’t even have to tell it anything about my Hauppauge tuner card, it automagically detected and configured it. Now I just need a cellphone with networking and video capabilities.

I got home from the Bay Area tonight and figured I’d check to see if my TiVo programming was available through TiVo Desktop. Much to my delight, I was able to see and queue up transfers right away. It’s really easy to transfer stuff using TiVo Desktop. That’s the good news.

Now the bad news. As I mentioned in an earlier post, TiVo ToGo isn’t exactly fast when it comes to transfering content from the TiVo to your desktop machine. The number I saw before was roughly 1GB per hour. I’m currently downloading Scrubs from yesterday. It’s a little over 600MB (medium quality) and it’s going to take over 35 mintues, putting it right smack in the 1GB/hour realm. Bear in mind, Scrubs is only 30 minutes long and I’m recording it at only medium quality. Imagine a 1 hour show recorded at higher quality, which I’m likely to do after I put a hard drive upgrade in my TiVo.

I can only hope there’s some way to script/schedule the transfer process so I can run it while I’m sleeping or away at work. Nice work TiVo…yet another nail in your coffin.

Update: I decided to see if the video would play on my PC before it completely downloaded, the results are mixed. Yes, it would start playing before the entire show had been pulled from the TiVo. Unfortunately, when Windows Media Player 10 loaded the file, it thought the program was only 24 minutes long. So after 24 minutes had played it stopped playing even though the full 30 minutes had been downloaded (it finished downloading while I was watching the first 24 minutes). I’m not sure if that’s to blame on TiVo or WMP, though. I’m guessing it’s WMP’s problem.

I also tried using GraphEdit to “un-DRM” the .tivo file. It works…well. It’s really fast, so I’m guessing it’s not doing very much to the original file (just stripping the DRM bits, not reencoding the entire thing). I really have no need for the non-DRM version, so I already deleted it. But it’s good to know that if the DRM gets in the way of my fair use of the content that I can work around it.

Now that I’m back home from the Bay Area, I’ve had a chance to set up all three of my machines (work machine, laptop and home machine) with the bookmark synchronization extension for Firefox. To put it simply, I love it. It’s fast and easy and I haven’t had a single problem with it yet (I realize that by saying that I’ve just doomed myself to some sort of catastrophic loss of bookmarks). This has virtually assured that I’ll set up SSL with DreamHost at some point so I’m not sending my password in the clear anymore to the WebDAV server.

Now I just wish there was an “Extension Synchronizer” extension, so I didn’t have to sync up the installed extensions between the three machines.

Bookmark synchronization has always been something I’ve wanted. The closest match I ever saw to what I wanted was the Yahoo! Toolbar. Unfortunately, the Y! Toolbar doesn’t have support for tabs in Firefox (I have a folder of bookmarks that I open every morning using the Firefox “Open in Tabs”).

Today I’ve started using the Firefox bookmark synchronization extension. I’m already pretty happy with it. It integrates with Firefox’s built-in bookmarking mechanism, meaning the tab integration works automatically. Additionally, it set up my bookmark toobar correctly (I put my most frequently accessed bookmarks there). It even preserved the “shortcuts” I set up (bookmarks with the keyword attribute set).

I’m currently storing my preferences in a WebDAV store and fetching them over HTTP. I may plunk down the extra cash to get my DreamHost account set up with a static IP so I can get an SSL certificate. That way I can start doing WebDAV over HTTPS. If you don’t have a WebDAV store, you can use FTP instead. There’s currently no support for SFTP (bummer), but maybe it’ll be there one day. If I end up getting WebDAV with SSL, though, I really won’t care.

Did anyone else get DVDs for Christmas? I ended up getting quite a few to stoke my collection a bit. I’ve watched 3 of them so far.

Chronicles of Riddick - Unrated Director’s Cut
I saw the first movie, Pitch Black, which wasn’t bad. Riddick is more fun. It picks up where Pitch Black leaves off, although the plot lines of the two movies share almost nothing in common (you don’t need to see Pitch Black to understand much of what’s going on). The only common thread between the two is Riddick, played by Vin Diesel. The unrated director’s cut adds 15 minutes of footage. Plenty of action, a so-so plot and an enjoyable character in Riddick. Diesel won’t win any Oscars, but the same could be said of Arnold and Sly in most of their big action movies.

i, Robot
Another science fiction, action movie. Will Smith plays a cop who doesn’t like robots and is assigned to a case where a robotics scientist mysteriously commits suicide. Good action, plenty of special effects and the usual, overplayed plot of technology turning on its creators (haven’t we seen this all before?). It’s a fun movie, though. Will Smith gets naked (you only get to see a silhouette of his butt in the shower), if you’re into that kind of thing.

Napoleon Dynamite
Damnit, this movie is just plain funny. Napoleon (Jon Heder) is the kid in school you always thought was weird. He has funny hair, glasses, an infinity of horse t-shirts and funny looking snow shoes. When he hooks up with the new kid, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), hilarity ensues as Napoleon helps to get Pedro elected class president. If you’re looking for stupid humor, sweet dance moves and a crazy uncle named “Rico”, you NEED to see this flippin’ sweet movie.

So much for WordPress, at least for now. Earlier today I installed WordPress 1.2.2 on my Debian machine. At first, the install went very nicely. It set itself up all by itself. All I had to do was hit a PHP page. That’s when the issues started cropping up, though.

Issue #1: One Blog to Rule Them All
WordPress appears to only let you have a single blog. I wanted to keep my personal blog and my honeymoon blog seperate. I could have used categories to keep them “seperate”, but I really just wanted to have seperate blogs. I’m also considering having one blog for my personal items and another for more technical things. This way I can give the link to the personal blog to my family members and not concern them with my ramblings about blogging software.

Issue #2: Blogger Import Not Working
I followed all the directions to import my personal blog from Blogger. WP even told me it had imported all my articles. It even created a new user for this “Ryan Kennedy” guy that was posting to that blog. But the articles never appeared. This was really annoying. There’s also an RSS import but it requires modifying some field in a PHP file before you can proceed. Lame.

Issue #3: Can’t Remove Users
When the Blogger import failed, I wanted to clean up the few things it did import. So I tried removing the “Ryan Kennedy” user. Too bad the user admin doesn’t seem to surface any way to remove users.

I give WordPress an “A” for effort but an “F” for execution. It might have been okay if I started my blog in WordPress, but getting my stuff moved over is clearly not going to be a walk in the park. So for now I’ll leave everything with Blogger.

No, this posting has nothing to do with the immortal rockers who paint themselves up and delude themselves into thinking they’re still cool. This is the other KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.

This weekend we bought a TiVo for Lisa’s parents. The SD-H400 was our TiVo of choice because it packs a DVD player to go along with the TiVo (her parents needed a new DVD player, their old one won’t play burned DVDs). Some cool things about the SD-H400:

• As I already mentioned, it has a DVD player. You can watch a DVD while you’re recording something on the TiVo.
• It’s a TiVo. If you own one you already understand what I’m saying. If you don’t own one, you need to get one.
• It comes with TiVo Basic.
• It’s a Series 2 TiVo and comes with all the related network-driven goodness.

TiVo Basic is essentially the TiVo service without the recurring monthly bill. The downside is you only get 3 days of guide data (compared to 12 on TiVo Plus) and you don’t get Season Pass. While some people may say why bother if you don’t get Season Pass, we were getting this for Lisa’s parents and didn’t know if they’d even like the TiVo. So having TiVo Basic as an option meant no need to commit to the service. It also meant we could give it to her parents and it would be functional without US having to pay the service.

Series 2 is a huge deal. It’s the reason I won’t buy the HD DirecTiVo, which is only a Series 1. Series 2 means you can hook your TiVo up to your home network using a USB ethernet or 802.11b adapter. Using your home network connection means no more using a phone line to download guide data or software updates. This is huge because: 1) who likes having their phone line tied up and 2) many people don’t have phone jacks behind their televisions.

So we went to BestBuy on Saturday and bought the SD-H400 and the Linksys WUSB11 wireless network adapter (it’s the one recommended by TiVo). I brought it back to our house, cracked it open and connected it to my Dell flat panel monitor (did I mention it’s the best monitor…EVER?) and phone line. I went through the setup, guessing in some places what her parents environment would be like and quickly got it to connect to TiVo over the phone line. This is important because the SD-H400 ships with an older version of the TiVo software that doesn’t support wireless network adapters. A quick update from TiVo and I had the new update. I cracked open the WUSB11 and pointed it at my wireless network. Within moments it had pulled a guide data update over my broadband connection. Everything was working very well.

Sunday I had to go back to BestBuy to pick out a wireless access point for her parents (can’t do much with just the adapter, after all). I settled on the WAP11, it was cheap, workable and could plug into their existing network with no changes. I brought the WAP11 back to my house, plugged it into my network and configured all of it’s security settings. Then I set up the TiVo to connect using it instead of my access point. Perfect, worked without a hitch.

So we packed the TiVo and wireless gadgets back into a box, wrapped them and delivered them to her parents. I had everything back out of the box and hooked up in about 15 minutes. A couple of tweaks here and there (their environment was slightly different than what I had imagined when I first set up the TiVo at my house). Within another 5 minutes we were recording the Olympics, pausing, rewinding and playing burned DVD’s. I was absolutely shocked at how dead simple it was to set the thing up. More impressively, there were at least half a dozen little places where the setup could have hit a snag and didn’t. God bless TiVo for making such a wonderfully designed product.

So now there’s a problem. Lisa’s parents have TiVo and we don’t. I may have to put aside my desire to wait for a good HD TiVo to come out and just settle on a SD TiVo.

This is my first experience using any blogging software so I figured I’d throw up some impressions I have of Blogger.

FTP/SFTP Support

I was blown away by the support for FTP/SFTP. I really wasn’t expecting to be able to have my blog posted anywhere but on Blogger’s servers. I was more blown away by the fact that it actually works. The interface for setting up directories is a little clunky and error reporting in the publishing tool lacks user friendly error reporting (I ran into a problem where uploading the archive directory was failing after I created my first post).

Template Support

You’re given a fairly limited set of templates to choose from when you create your blog (of course, they could have made you create the whole template on your own). However, once your blog is created you can edit the raw HTML of the template to make it look however you want. This is especially important if you’re using the FTP/SFTP functionality to integrate your blog into an existing site’s look and feel.

Syndication Support

A quick flip of a switch and Blogger will enable syndication for your blog using Atom. This is great because you get it for free, although it would be nice if they offered to do RSS as well (though it’s understandable given Blogger is run by Google now and Google’s pushing Atom hard).

Editing Interface

The interface for adding postings is really nice and easy to use. A whizzy rich-text editor with spell checking and image upload capability (although I haven’t tested the image upload yet). Flickr even appears to have a way to add a picture to your account and then blog that picture.

Blog Management

There’s lots of knobs you can twist tweak your blog. Additionally you can add other Blogger members to your blog, allowing them to edit, post and delete blog postings. Once you create your account on Blogger, you have an interface to add and maintain multiple blogs, making it easy to set up different blogs for different topics.

In all, I’m very pleased with Blogger.