B-L-O-G-G-E-R.com

Script of Interview
Done by Free Blogging Advice Guidelines Project
with
Denis Bernardy - Inventor of Semiologic

Hello Denis, I am Dim Vasen from Free Blogging Advice Guidelines project, and I am really happy to be having an interview with you which, I think, can be of great help to many bloggers throughout the world. Denis, you are warmly welcomed here.

Thank you.

I have sent you a list of questions to make you not that surprised about what people are asking here and you have that list as well. That’s why - if you don’t mind - I would like to go to question number one which is quite simple. I have been in this situation, many people have been as well.

 

Question 1.
What should ideal blogging platform have inside?

So that people could make proper choice. What’s your opinion about what should be inside a perfect blogging platform.

I think I would say what’s around it is more important than what’s in it. What’s in it obviously you would expect things like an ad manager, the ability to have leverage on the way things are laid out and some leverage on managing your header and the tool on managing your navigational menu, whatever.

But all that ultimately are tiny features that you add up together. There is just a tremendous amount of features that are available for WordPress. You know, you can always add the missing components which is rare, because with Semiologic PRO because there are so many things there already.

I think that they key thing that one should be looking for when looking for a blogging software is someone who’s accountable, someone who maintains it in the background. That would be the key value of Semiologic PRO. It’s not just a piece of software. It’s a piece of software that is maintained. And there is community around it, value added service providers, virtual assistants to help out users who don’t want spend time configuring their blog. There are copywriters, there are people who do skinning and graphic design, there is the community forum where you can get all sort of answers to all sorts of questions. And I am around to answer questions as well, and there is a guy who works with me on a regular basis - Mike - who is also extremely helpful.

I think much more than the actual features - ad management, poll manager, events management, all sorts of related widgets, all sorts of fuzzy widgets that allow you to list posts and pages, etc.

But the core value of what you should be looking for when you are looking for a blog software is much more related to maintenance. Like making sure when a new version of WordPress shows up not everything is broken as happens often. This is where the value in Semiologic Pro is. When there is a WordPress update, Semiologic Pro gets updated as well. We update absolutely everything when necessary.

In particular this latest WordPress update - it was 2.3 - it broke like 50% of plugins. And we repaired single one of them so that the customers could upgrade their blogs. And we’ll continue doing that with the next versions as well.

I really like your point because I did not think it this way, to be frank. But I agree with what you are saying. It’s absolutely scary when you have picked a blogging platform to be abandoned. Yes, for example, there is WordPress, there are many plugins to it. But if the plugins are free, no one would care about giving a help to you.

And I, by the way, was personally surprised with the support and that you answer the questions, I was also getting answers from Mike. Think about the support, who is behind, are they helping or not - then you have very great chances to be successful with your blog and, definitely, this blogging platform.

Read Question 2 about how to fight comment spam here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Denis Bernardy - Semiologic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.