Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com.
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Livefyre (discontinued)
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
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Medium
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Medium is a blogging and web publishing platform from the company of the same name in San Francisco, California.
It's well-suited for helping you reinforce SEO for another site. It's OK for creating a real quick blog if you or a client needs something fast that does not demand a great visual design or a lot of visual content. If you want to create a super sharp-looking blog with a lot of visual content, WordPress will outperform Blogger by about 16 zillion to 1. Like, it's not even at all close. I would never use Blogger as my company's website. That would almost automatically consign your site to a very lonely existence.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
If you are vanity publishing and just want to see your stuff on the web, it is very, VERY easy to get involved with. Of course, your writing is not likely to stand out if you don't have a clear plan. The more I use it, the more I like it. The user interface is extremely well-done. I kinda wish my WordPress-based blogs had editors that were that easy to use.
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
I love the additional income and how great my blogs have turned out. It's given me ideas for others to build their blogs and has attained new clients for me. I make money using AdSense, how little or how much I want to make is up to me promoting my Blog.
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
Blogger has a simple layout with descriptive instructions when you first sign up. It can be intimidating at first but is easy to learn through simple navigation and a little trial and error
Google doesn't support anything that's free. Anything. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a help number for a free Google app where you could pick up a phone and get a credible voice on the other end. Unless you're actually paying Google for a service you don't exist.
Medium is supported across android, iOS and the web. While it may not have all the languages supported, English is certainly an option and with a pricing model that ranges from free to $5 for a subscription, you can't go wrong whether you're a small or large business. Everything is hosted in the cloud so it is very accessible
Have a plan written out for yourself, you can always make changes as you go. It's more difficult to build a Blog if one doesn't even know what the Blog is going to be about. It's best to plan what your Blog is going to be about and what your audience is going to be and what you want to accomplish before you start building.
I've selected Blogger due to its simple user interface and open source feature. I can make my pages within a few minutes and add them to my website quickly, unlike other software, Iike Wix or WordPress, which is more advanced and requires pre-learning to make efficient use of them. With Blogger, I can start my blog building directly without any prior knowledge and coding.
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
There are a handful of other blogging platforms available. The biggest difference between Medium and others is how streamlined it is. It's straight to the point and is excellent at showing related content, be it your own or another users. There's no new design to navigate between posts, everything is where you expect it to be letting you focus on the post.
Before using Blogger, we were sending out information to agents via email and they would either delete them or just not find them. Now since we keep all the information in one place, it has cut down repetitive questions and has given our agents a voice as to what is working for them and what is not.
We don't have any hard numbers, but we have heard back from our agents that the blog posts help them and not have to rely on contacting support stuff as often to find answers to simple questions.
The only negative impact felt so far is with a few select agents leaving negative feedback to blog due to personal issues they have with policies within the company.
Good way to raise awareness of our content with @mentioned influencers
Good way to link back to your original content
Aside from publishing your own content Medium is a great news site in its own right. If you're looking for relevant industry news or other content, check in daily to see what's going on with others in your industry.
