Yesterday furilo and friends launched La Coctelera, a free blogging service. It's pretty good as a simple blogging app and build in rails. They do somethings really well, the design is slick and the interface simple but clear. The tabs didn't quite make sense to me, but in general i like they app. They use ajax and dhtml in a subtle way which enhances the web experience without feeling overbearing. The interface for editing the page, posting articles, editing past articles, the title, and generally managing the blog is brilliant. It's the page, you can click on each section, and it loads the editing of that section. As you write your blog entry, you can see below what it will look like. This functionality also exists in typo a rails based blogging system i'm about to move anarchogeek over to using.
The system is light on features, but in a good way, which makes me feel like the are agile and really are releasing the simplest thing which could possibly work. I'm sure they will iterate and follow up by adding features. There's a hint of some sort of social network style building in the comments and the login within the system. I don't know if they are thinking that way, but it could be interesting.
The system is only in spanish, but if you don't know spanish, i still recommend you make it through setting up a blog to check out the interface for managing a blog. Just for those who want to know, "nombre de usario" is username, "contraseña" is password, and "apellidos" is last names.
The tab interface is awkward and it wasn't clear to me how to get in to the preferences section from the main blog management page. The other big issue which is fixable, is they give urls like http://w3.lacoctelera.com/rabble where they really should be giving out rabble.miblog.com or something short, and clearly the name of the user. Another thing which should be added is clear and easy ways to import flickr, delicious, etc...
My feeling is their user based is focused on the new users just starting blogging, not the advanced user, but still even the newbe needs to be able to benefit from the network effect and use webservices.
They don't currently let the user edit their templates or style sheets. This is probably ok, but they should open up a way to add a custom stylesheet layer. They can't really open up the main templates for user editing for security reasons because they're probably using the rails standard ERB which is not really secure.
Posted by rabble at May 9, 2005 11:17 PMThanks for your nice critic!
Tabs now don't make too much sense as they are only too, but that's because we are adding more in the future.
We are working on the URL thing to let you have your own domain and maybe more generic domains to let the user choose. We didn't see much difference between user.lacoctelera.com or lacoctelera.com/user ... that's many of the battles we have had, and user feedback will guide us in adding new features...
The editing of the stylesheet and templates is surely our priority # 1... also we have almost ready the import scripts from other blogging systems, and things like tags, flickr, apis, open data are on our table :)
Posted by: álvaro at May 10, 2005 09:04 AM