Hot shot wordpress blogger Robert Scoble sang the praises of a demo for scrapblog.com. Without viewing the demo, I figured it looked interesting enough to try out.

So…

Behold my first scrapblog entry!

Here’s an example of it embeded on my myspace blog (waiting patiently for Matt and crew at wordpress to develop their own embed workaround - [scrapblog=http://bigstarlet.scrapblog.com/test], perhaps?). No, it’s not a supendious piece of work. I just grabbed some random pics and went for it…

So, how was it and how did I do it?

Well…

1. The registration process crashed my browser, and the kill was so complete I had to restart my computer in order to get Flock working again. But I still got my activation email.

2. I don’t have a lot of pics on my PC these days (or at least within easy access of my C Drive - I’m still hurting from my back up hard drive crash back in August), but Scrapblog allows for import from your Flickr account (apparently, though, you have to authorize the connection each and every time you access the scrapblog to add more pics…grr!)

3. You…need…Flash. The latest version.

4. Sometimes, even with my now souped-up ‘puter, I found some of the functionality slow going and rather cumbersome. Pics didn’t automatically move around when I tried to drag them around the workspace (at least not initally; it got better when I went back in to edit). Resizing was kinda clutzy. It’s got some pic editing functionality (which is good), but kinda basic - then again, I have to consider the photo editing software knowledge of the target audience for this thing - most grandmas I know think Photoshop is their local 1 Hour Photo dealer, or something.

5. You can choose backgrounds, themes, frames, etc. But what if you want your own background, frame, etc. There’s no place to set that up.

6. This thing would absolutely ROCK if you could have fade effects on both items and pages.

7. Anyplace to load a music file? I can easily see this becoming a way for folks to share blogs with a musical background. Or verbally describe what’s going on (maybe incorporate a podcast in it, some how). Or, dare I say it - allow bedroom recording artists like myself to make makeshift music videos?!?!?!?!?!

I understand a new version of scrapblog is in the works and is being beta tested by some of their users. I’m positive the questions noted above have already been addressed. I’ve only played with this thing for a half hour, so I’m sure I’ll discover a lot more as I go along. As of now, the current verdict as I stated on my myspace blog entry regading this tool still stands.

T-Tags: Tech Web_Junk
D-Tags: Tech Web_Junk