Microsoft finally makes their long-rumored debut into the weblogging service arena with MSN Spaces. I got curious, and it’s free, so I went ahead and signed up for a Space of my own to try it out. I have no intentions of moving over…I just wanted to kick the tires a bit, so to speak.
Signup is pretty easy, as long as you have a MS Passport (I didn’t…but now I do). So far, it seems to be a fairly decent option for beginning bloggers — it’s free, there are a decent number of design templates (though there’s only so much customization you can do, much like the entry-level TypePad system), you can choose whether or not to syndicate your blog (with RSS 2.0 only), comments and Trackback are both supported (interestingly, Trackback has three options: disable, accept from everywhere, and accept only from other MSN Space weblogs, with the last option being the default [and I don’t seem to be able to switch it off of the default so that I can allow Trackback pings from everyone]), there are a few default categories and custom categories can be added…all the basics, and some frills.
MSN Spaces apparently ties in tightly with both MSN Messenger and MS Outlook (though I can’t play with that, being a Mac user), and as such, adds a special privacy option that can restrict visibility of your weblog to only people on your MSN Messenger Allow list, along with an option to only allow selected contacts in your MSN Address Book to see your blog.
There are settings for moblogging (blogging via cell phone) — amusingly, though, when I first clicked on the “Mobile” settings tab, I got an “unknown authority” error dialog. Not having a cell phone, there’s not much here I can play with.
You get 10 MB of storage, with no indication if there’s a way to increase this (or if there will be a way in the future). That should be fine for a good amount of text, but enough photos will eventually eat into that, so there’s a simple file manager to allow you to delete any photos you’ve uploaded.
Finally, there are some simple statistics available, showing total page views, views this week, today, and in the last hour, along with a referrer list (no idea how extensive the referrer list is, as I’ve got all of three hits so far while poking around with things).
So far, so good — it looks like a decent entry-level weblogging service.
One thing did catch my eye, though, and it could be a big one: apparently, posts have to be written with paragraph tags (\<p> and \</p>) or linebreak tags (\
), otherwise your text gets all smooshed together into a single paragraph. I was surprised enough that this would be the default behavior after I posted my first test post, but looking through the interface, I can’t see an option to turn on any sort of automatic linebreak conversion that would allow someone to type normally and actually get paragraphs. I can see this causing some serious headaches from HTML-ignorant newcomers who expect to see paragraphs and instead get huge blocks of unseparated text!
(Caveat: I am looking at this via Safari on my Mac, so it’s entirely possible that this actually works correctly with IE/Win — though if that’s the case, that’s another strike against the system, in my view.)
There is a note on the bottom of the posting screen that “Some HTML tags may be removed from your entry for security and formatting reasons” — unfortunately, they don’t list which tags may be removed. And what’s this “may” bit? Are they or aren’t they? Will the list of which tags get removed change from time to time, and if so, why? Odd.
Clicking the “Trackback” link takes you to the comment entry form, and I can’t find a Trackback link to send a ping to. I can’t find a Trackback address in the source code, either, and auto-discovery from the MT QuickPost interface isn’t coming up with anything either. Perhaps that’s due to not being able to set the global Trackback acceptance flag?
Permalinks are ugly — for instance, the permalink for my first test post is http://spaces.msn.com/members/michaelhanscom/Blog/cns!1plKnLKPq0gBtnAfWaupqTNA!106.entry. Ouch.
Source code is also ugly (though honestly, that’s exactly what I expected). Heavily table-based, lots of crud and cruft. Running it through the W3C validator returns 193 errors, and that’s after the validator displays a big warning that no Doctype was found so it’s guessing 4.01 Transitional.
End result: it’ll keep newbies and MS fans happy (assuming that that bit with requiring paragraph or linebreak tags is fixed), but power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.
(via Scoble)
“Making Plans for Nigel” by XTC from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1979, 4:10).
