Till this time, We’ve seen some of the great blogging tools but all of them were desktop blogging clients but this time we are going to write the review of a blogging platform. The platform is TeraPad. The blogging platform is currently a hosted solution and doesn’t have the option of letting you download the whole software and then letting you choose the option of hosting on your own servers. Anyway, that is also one of the good features as one doesn’t have to take pains for finding and installing the package. Let’s look at some of the features of this blogging platform…
PROS of terapad :
1. More than a blog : The best thing about this service is that it is much more than a blog. It has a set of tools which make it much more powerful. It has inbuilt shopping cart (paypal shop), image gallery, web page publishing, job board, forum, integration with third party tools and a lots more. Well, there are so many features that it becomes really difficult to list them here and that is what I love in one service and that is huge list of features and terapad has scored a 10 on 10 in this section.
2. Hosted Solution : Terapad is a hosted solution and thus anyone can start their own terapad site in just few minutes and that too without any technical knowledge. They take the pain of keeping your site up and running and that makes things much more simple. They give 2 GB of space and that also keeps things nice on your pocket.
3. WYSIWYG Editor : It has the WYSIWYG editor and thus publishing things are quite easy. The good thing is that it lets people insert videos as well! The videos can be inserted from Google Video, Grouper and the big daddy of video services and that is YouTube!
4. Templates and template editor : It has some decent templates however they are not the best but it has the template editor which lets you easily make changes in the whole template and the good thing is that it is all controlled with CSS and thus you don’t have to worry about learning anything new as CSS is relatively simple and you can also find various templates around in the web and that too quite easily.
5. Use of domain names : Another beautiful feature of the service is that it lets you use your own domain name. You just have to change the CNAME records and you can make use of your own domain name.
6. Oh I forgot one thing! Its Free : Do you think I need to explain anything in this one :D
CONS of terapad :
1. Google Ads : The service puts some ads on your terapad site. However, the ads are not obtrusive and thus don’t annoy much. However, some of the pros will always want to remove the ads from their site and will like to put their own ads. They do give the option of removing the ads as well but that is for a small fee.
2. Readable URLs : Terapad seems to be generating the pages with strange strings and fails to generate the URLs in readable formats. Search engines favor those kind of URLs and thus Terapad looses on this portion. Good writers don’t have to worry about this at all, they can still generate traffic easily with the power of their writing :D.
3. Download-able Option : Unfortunately this excellent piece of software is not available for download and thus no one can install this on their servers. I think that if they start giving this then certainly it may help them in creating a good community and will give them popularity as well.
Overall Rating & Views :
To be honest this service is really good and thus any one will fall in love with the amount of features it has. If you are looking to start a new site or blog then this is the solution which you’ll always want to have. It will beat wordpress (I know that many won’t agree but have a look at the features first) if at all they work on its very small list of CONS. My suggestion is to go ahead and use this service, you’ll certainly love it.
Links : TeraPad
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Rootprotect
January 9th, 2007 at 7:13 am #
It’s Gud to know abt a new platform for blogging. Will certainly check and see where it stands as compared to the other platform. Keep up the hard work…
Review
December 2nd, 2007 at 7:14 am #
Nonsense. This fawning, biased review is next to useless. Downplaying the cons is simply irresponsible. First you say it’s friendly to people with no technical knowledge (which is why a hosted solution is attractive in the first place). Then you say you need to know how to edit CSS to modify the templates. I suppose you think everybody on the street knows how to edit CSS stylesheets?
The templates in Terapad are ridiculous. They all look the same- no top menus, imagine! Even the navigation in the side menus is baffling and illogical- and you can’t change it. BIG thumbs down on customising the look of your site.
Also, the lack of search engine friendly URLs is simply inexcusable. Good luck if you’re running a traffic-dependent business (and who isn’t?)
You didn’t say anything about uptime. Terapad is often down for ‘routine maintenance’. For a hosted service provider, this is simply inexcusable. Granted, this may be only for the free accounts- if the paid accounts are not guaranteed at least 5 9s (99.999%) uptime, then it’s just a joke.
ReviewSaurus
December 2nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm #
Well, Review…I’ll say that yes, somehow I over rated this software but you certainly can’t say that its a biased review.
The list of CONS is still there, I thought the company will work hard on it and will try to fix up the things but unfortunately there’s no real update from them.
For present, I’ll say that they are no where close to the community of WordPress but yes, the features which they provide as a whole package is still appreciable.
Wordpress is powerful only if you can combine the plugins. I personally use WordPress, so I know how powerful and flexible it is and unfortunately, its sad that TeraPad isn’t working hard in making its product better and that’s what I’ll say that they are no good in front of WordPress at this time.
If you notice this review was done around 11 months back and I think with time, thinking can change and same has happened in my case. It did impress me at that time but no development from their side has unfortunately shifted my opinion.