OK, so M$ has officially dumped Windows Live Space, it’s just such a sad news to me. I’ve started blogging three years ago, 241 posts which averages about 1.5 post per week. I remember how I hated doing diaries during my elementary school and writing weekly essays when I was in China, because there’s really not too much going on in my life that deserves to be recorded so frequently. But blogging, at my own pace, is actually something I enjoyed doing, well, some of the posts are a bit show off, or most of them are pretty technical, but they really record my growing knowledge about video/audio technology. Out of 241 posts, about 90% I spent lots of time writing them, the rest are a little sloppy. Several things happened during the three years of my blogging life, first is my constantly researching for a better blogging place, tried a couple big ones such as fc2, blogger, livejournal, wordpress, I’ve always come back to Live Space because of its unique features such as dynamic page layout, which I can use super wide pictures (at least 800pixels on a 1024*768 monitor), lists which I can link to another site and make some comments, connects with msn messenger directly, which I’ve made some friends with through blogging, and statistics which tracks back all websites where it originally link from. The Live wave4 update removed the statistics feature which was a huge deal breaker so I have to start looking for a new blogger service which I think I finally settled down on blogger this time. But blogger is still lacking some of the features I’m looking for, the dynamic page isn’t dynamic although I can change the CSS style for accommodating the 800pixel width, I just don’t understand why the f*ck people prefer using narrow columns for their blogs, which you have to click every single picture to zoom in in order to see what is going on, it just never makes sense to me. Also the statistics feature, despite google made some effort on improving it such as using the same tech as google analytic, it’s just NOT the same as Live Space, it won’t track back the websites for example, also despite it provides a “don’t track my page view” feature, it still tracks my page views anyway, furthermore it enforces autopagenation, which saves on their resources, but it’s really irritate for people such as me who want to post long articles. I think the only solution to make me totally happy would be hosting my own blog, but it’s not gonna happen any time soon since I don’t want to get into the trouble of setting up all the stuff and pay domain and web hosting fees. Second is the development of Windows Live Writer, which simplifies my blogging significantly, it offers some great feature such as tables, links, graphics, but the video part is extremely weak, which I have to log into the site and do it from their. Third thing is my inner otaku power suddenly woke up sometime around 2008 so that I was really into anime at the time (maybe Macross Frontier was the cause), up until now I’m still watching on a regular basis, just not as much, but since then my blog postings have been centered on anime topics quite a lot, which I eventually renamed my blog’s name to “Anime, movies, home entertainment technology”.
I believe moving to blogger is the right decision for me. While losing some functions from Live Space, I have some new things to play around with blogger. This blog is still under construction, hopefully I could finish updating all the pages soon. Lastly, I have backed up all my old posts from Live Spaces and it’s available for download.
