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Earthlink Debuts Corporate Blog, snubs own hosting and blogging services

by
January 18, 2005

Major US ISP Earthlink has debuted its first corporate blog. The site provides information to help its customers.

The blog is being powered by the SixApart owned TypePad and hosted with Pittsburgh based pair Networks, Inc. (SixApart’s host), undoubtedly good for SixApart but highly strange given that Earthlink is a host within its own right, and offers blogging software as part of its Trellix Site Builder package.

A vote of no confidence from Earthlink management in its own hosting and tools?

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(intro via Steve Rubel)

View Comments (5)

  • Trellix isn’t meant to be as advanced a blogging platform as Typepad is, but then again Trellix lets users build more than just blogs, such as Resumés, online Businesses, Services and various forms of annotated picture Albums, which, while it also offers Picture Albums, Typepad isn’t in the business of doing to an equivalent extent. Typepad started as a blogging platform from the ground-up, Trellix was designed as a simple home-page and website authoring tool. Typepad does the blogging thing better. Trellix has more breadth.

    so … earthlink decided to go for a blog-building tool to … *gasp* … actually … build a BLOG?

    Apples … Oranges, anyone?

  • Chris
    Maybe so, but if they didn’t like their own blogging tool (they promote as a doing blogs, as well as other things) then they could have used WordPress or a similar solution and hosted it themselves. I’m not an Earthlink customer so it doesn’t worry me, but if I was looking to have a blog and was considering Earthlink as my host, I’d think twice knowing that they don’t use their own hosting services for their own corporate blog.

  • well, there are many things they coulda/woulda/shoulda done, but hey, i personally hate configuring someone else’s web application package on my own server, and i’m an application developer, so i could see how a bunch of enthusiastic PHB-types didn’t really care to do it themselves.

    Not to mention that a number of cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities were found and recently patched in WordPress, and constantly updating web applications packages is a real pain in the rump. I’d rather let someone else worry about it. a hosted solution who’s in the business of offering tools to build and hosting full-featured personal and professional BLOGS pretty-much guarantees you an end-to-end working solution, at all times, and they’re the ones having to worry about fixing security holes, because in the end, that’s what you pay them for. If i was a PHB-type, i’d like that.

    And frankly, as a paying broadband subscriber since 2000, i’d rather have earthlink keep dedicating its engineering resources toward services they offer to *ME*, such as the start page and webmail, rather than run and maintain some PHBs’ PR stint.

    but hey. people were bound to pick-up on the fact they’re not hosting their own blog, after all, you gotta go for the sensationalistic headline. fair ’nuff.

  • Trellix is not a blogging tool, plain and simple. It’s a homepage builder that happens to include a blogging component for people who may want to add a daily journal to their personal web page. EarthLink promotes it on our intro to blogging page for those customers who may be new to blogging and want to take advantage of the 10GB website they get with their account.

    However, if a seasoned user wanted to build and maintain an advanced weblog, we would highly recommend they use one of the feature-rich blogging tools like TypePad or Blogger.

    Chris Brandon
    Managing Editor, EarthLink Protection Blog

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