AlloCiné (kind of a French IMDb, with more end-user functionality) launches its own blog platform [via] and, lo and behold, it’s based on the same CMS as the infamous (and unfamous) Illico blogs. (A very crappy platform that got launched last year, announcing they were the first French gay blog platform even though we beat them by two or three years.)
Signing up is more complicated than it should, of course, because AlloCiné very much wants to you sign up to the whole site and give out your contact information, but the rest of the interface has improved a bit since Blog-n-co (and the name is better, too — at least they weren’t stupid enough not to use the opportunity to give their brand name more exposition). And there’s a really nice functionality that does take advantage of the connection to AlloCiné :
“Your post is about a movie, TV show or actor and you want to link it directly to an AlloCiné page?
” proceeds (with a bit of Ajax) to:
“Check the box next to the information you want to display after your post.
”
I have no idea how good it looks on the final blog page, though, because I had a tiny problem there:
No matter how hard I click, my post isn’t saved. I’m sent back to the administration home page, but still have zero post in my list. Since the platform is already in use, I suppose it’s just because I’m using Safari.
I’m not sure anyway why you’d want to create a blog looking like this (although dull layout and big ads haven’t prevented other platforms from rising):
At least you don’t get interstitial ads like on the rest of AlloCiné — not yet anyway.
But all of that doesn’t matter much compared to the big flaw: I can’t find anywhere a list of AlloCiné blogs — just like on Blog-n-co, incidentally: I figure that’s a way of hiding that nobody uses it, but it doesn’t entice people to try it out. Community is the way to go (or so I observed; personally I hate people… but then I’m blogging on my own domain name).
Disclosure: I know one of the founders of Abricoo, the company that developed this blog platform. And, being myself one of the founders of Gayattitude, I’m in competition with other free blog hosting solutions.
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