Tripod
Tripod offers lots of customization, but the platform is much too slow to load.
Ryan Singel
Lycos's Tripod blog and Web site platform offers free and customizable blogs and photo galleries. The software has improved much in the last year, and users can now blog via e-mail, maintain group blogs, create photo galleries, and edit templates and designs. The site's overall design, however, harks back to the premillennium Web era: All blog control options are lumped on a single page, rather than separated by category tabs for management, design, and posting functions. Moreover, both the control panel and blog pages are frustratingly slow to load.
Using an external domain requires an upgrade to the $9-per-month account, which gives you a paltry 50MB of storage but a decent 10GB of bandwidth (data that can be downloaded from your blog each month). Lycos offers a selection of basic templates, but they are garishly heavy on background images; a decent Web designer could fix them, though, as Lycos allows you to customize templates with your own code.
Lycos also offers free client-side software, called Qumana, which will let you post ads on your blog. The software is a great way to speed up your publishing, and can work with almost any blog hosting provider.
Posting a new entry entails negotiating a visually busy WYSIWYG form that features more than 30 icons. The page has a few nice touches, though; you can include and edit audio and video, for instance, or switch to HTML view.
Unfortunately, the Tripod platform is painfully slow. Opening a new-post window took as long as 20 seconds when I tried it. Tripod blogs themselves also loaded significantly slower than those running on any of the other platforms I tested.
It's a shame. If Lycos could take user interface lessons from other platforms and speed up its back end, it would have a chance at truly reinvigorating the once-mighty Tripod community.
Ryan Singel
