Friday, December 7. 2007

Ning vs Blogging Software

I think I'm only a few days away from releasing my first Ning template and I know I have a lot of very loyal readers who are possibly wondering what I'm upto. Originally I started producing templates for Serendipity because I wanted a blog that could also act like a traditional website in terms of allowing me to maintain static pages. This worked very well for me and still does on this very site amongst others.

However, Serendipity and Blogger (the other platform I produce templates for) are primarily designed for content management. They have some social networking functionality in the form of comments and trackbacks, and with Serendipity you could install a shoutbox or discussion forum, or simply set one of these up within a subfolder, but they still aren't dedicated social networking scripts.

Ning by contrast is first and foremost a social networking script. It does offer some blogging functionality, but is nowhere near as advanced as Blogger or Serendipity. Ning does provide comments and RSS feeds, but tags (labels) are not currently supported.
One thing I do like about Ning though, they use the same format for blog entry titles as I do on this site. The entry title is contained within an HTML <h3> on main pages, and then changes to an <h1> on the full blog entry page, which I firmly believe aids SEO. It's a nice touch that doesn't involve hacking your HTML.

My opinion of Ning after a few days of using it is that it won't replace my normal blog. Instead the two will probably sit side by side and complement each other. This is because I actively promote my blog and have been known to tweak the HTML for SEO purposes. I enjoy seeing my blog entries on the first page of Google's search results. BTW, welcome to my howto write Christmas cards visitors.

So I guess one of the logical questions that will inevitably arise from other bloggers involves why have two blogs, one on Ning, and the other somewhere else. I plan to use the blogging functionality of Ning to announce things that are specific to Ning that my regular readers here wouldn't be interested in. Take a look at my first Ning network to see what I'm talking about.

This blog by contrast, really has nothing to do with Ning at all. Actually it's quite amusing, I spend all my time promoting Serendipity, yet 95% of all my template traffic is from the blogspot world. And to those people I say, thanks for linking to me and using my templates, and when you're ready to get a more advanced blog, choose Serendipity, it's the Mac of the blogging world.

I seem to have digressed rather nicely, getting back to Ning vs Blogging Software, I really want to touch on the social networking side of Ning. The main reason anyone should pick Ning is the community aspect, giving your members their own profile page, letting them write their own blog entries within your community, allowing photos, videos and sound files to be uploaded and sorted, tagged and even voted on. In addition, create a no-fuss forum with sub-forums and tagged threads, and everything is linked back to the member's profile page, it's beautiful, just like that other big network, except it's my own network. It's white label social networking at it's best.

A bonus for me is that themes or skins for Ning seem to be even easier to produce than Blogger or Serendipity, but in a completely different way which requires a mind-shift. The Ning page layout is incredibly complex and reading the common stylesheet would be enough to put anyone into a straitjacket, but once you get the madness under control it's an incredibly solid and elegant layout. I'm loving it.


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Posted by Carl in Ning Templates at 21:56   Comments (2)
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  1. Paul Dillinger said,

    Wednesday, December 12. 2007 at 11:14 (Reply)

    After joining your Ning community I'm really impressed. The software is top notch, and it seems to perform very quickly. How easy did you find it to setup an account and get started? Was it a few hours to get something going, or more like a full weekend project?

  2. Carl said,

    Wednesday, December 12. 2007 at 11:20 (Reply)

    Setting up an account on Ning and creating a network literally took me less than five minutes, two of which were my own fault for wondering through to the kitchen to get a coffee.

    The hardest part was writing content and opening iPhoto to export a couple of photos to put on my test site. Ning is probably the easiest platform I've ever joined.

    As for learning about the theming in Ning, that probably took me a couple of days.

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