I am not a fan of Blogger. It can’t be hosted on your own server, and there is an element of control missing that Wordpress has and Blogger doesn’t.
So when I saw Alison Rosen using Blogger, I wanted to help her move to Wordpress, and start using her own domain name. I’m no designer, but here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
I got Facebook Connect up and running with the help of Disqus. Each post has the ShareThis plugin, in addition to the Tweetmeme plugin.
Also, moving from Blogger was a breeze. You login to Blogger within Wordpress and it just imports everything.
Another cool thing that I did is cached her Twitter feed. I modified this code to accept the JSON instead of an RSS feed. We are only hitting the Twitter API every ten minutes, instead of everytime someone hits the site.
Hope you like the site. I plan on building more things into it, and eventually trying to get a real designer to take a look at it.
Check out her demo reel, she is pretty funny:
I wanted to help her because she blogs A LOT. And she deserves to have a nice place for her to express herself, and for her audience to contribute. What do you think of the site?
