Best Chinese blog provider?

[spitz]

I am thinking of starting a blog and it is important for me that it can be accessible without problems within the PRC. What Chinese blog provider would you recommend me to use?

I have checked several ones, including sina, tianya, bokee, blogcn, sohu, baidu space, etc.

Blogcn seems to have the kind of clean uncluttered templates that I am looking for.

However, browsing through random links I have come upon too many abandoned blogs there, with a last post along the lines of "blogcn sucks, so I'm moving somewhere else".

Thanks in advance for any insights.

[BrandeX]

www.spaces.live.com ?

[zhwj]

One thing to note is often when people say "xxx blog provider sucks" it means that filtering is too strict - too many posts getting deleted for sensitive words.

Some things to consider:

1) Will any of your audience be unable to read Chinese? Most Chinese BSPs provide only a Chinese interface (that is, they don't switch languages according to IP address or cookies), so casual commenters surfing in from outside of China may find navigation confusing.

2) What is your preferred browser? I once kept a blog on Bokee (BlogChina at that time). I was fairly satisfied with their software, and they were really responsive to issues I mailed them with (when one set of CSS tweaks broke English-language word wrapping, they reverted it as soon as I notified them about it). But then they upgraded, and their new javascript broke in my Opera browser. Everything was OK except for the "submit" button, which didn't work at all.

Sina currently does weird javascript stuff that sometimes doesn't work with minor browsers. Firefox seems to do fairly well, but IE is really required to guarantee that nothing strange is going on.

Other platforms:

- Sohu does even more AJAX dynamic loading stuff than sina does.

- People like YCul, but it's pretty slow sometimes.

- Baidu Spaces will get your posts into the search index quickly

[spitz]

Many thanks for the ideas.

I use Firefox, could that be a problem? I seem to be able to read the blogs without hassle, but I don't know how it is from the writing side. I'll make sure and try several test posts before committing to a server.

Good point on the Chinese only interface. I'll check that too.

[BrandeX]

The interface for authors and viewers alike at the live.com blog area I mentioned is in many languages including english, chinese, etc.