phil ringnalda

Anil links to blogs.rediff.com, saying that “rediff is india’s biggest portal, and it looks like this is an install of the new version of Blogger.” Ish. I certainly hope that he meant that sarcastically. It looks more to me like they hired the same cloners as weblogger.co.br (who appear to be no more), but fired them before they finished the job.

My first hint that maybe something wasn’t quite right about them was when I noticed the guy with the pencil in his teeth who appears on the right side, in the “New Users, sign up” box. Anyone who has spent time at blogs.salon.com should feel right at home, since Rediff’s guy, while a mirror image, has the pencil held in exactly the same place in an oddly familiar set of teeth.

After checking out some of the entries in the “Latest Entries” in the center column, which all date from January 19th (not “Fresh” in the left column, which were newly created a week or so ago), I signed up for an account. It’s quick and easy, and once you get past lying about your personal information and get to create a blog, quite familiar to anyone who has created a blog on Blogger: same fields, same layout, roughly the same wording on the explanation of what “Public blog:” means. The choice of templates, while a bit limited (there are six), is quite nice looking. From there it’s all downhill. While everything on the posting page is pretty much where you would put it if you were cloning Blogger, down to a quite familiar “getting started” guide in the bottom frame, rather than imitating Blogger’s “this is a serious and functional application that needs every inch of screen to function” look, which I think is actually a huge part of Blogger’s appeal, they have what looks like a “fun and fresh” webmail interface.

They have the same rather trusting system for putting their ads in your blog that weblogger.co.br used: the ad code is in your template. Yup. If you want Ad-Free Blogs.Rediff.com, you upgrade by deleting a couple of tables and some Javascript from your template.

Also of interest in the template, beyond the familiar bloggerTags (they did change <Blogger> to <rediffBlog>, but other than that the tags are the same), is their approach to the archive links and template situation. Archive links are pulled in with the same familiar <script type="text/javascript" src="<$BlogArchiveFileName$>"></script>, but rather than have a separate archive template, they follow that with a <BlogArchiveFormat> container, which lets you define the stuff which will appear in the document.write in what’s clearly an exact copy of the stock Blogger archive template. Seems like the least they could have done to clone my Script Generator instead, particularly since it appears that India uses DD/MM/YYYY dates, but the archive links are in the hated-worldwide Blogger MM/DD/YYYY-MM/DD/YYYY format.

One final warning: if you decide to sign up to check it out, and sensibly use a throwaway email address from somewhere like spammotel.com, you’ll need to know that although they accept capital letters in the username/email field, they store it in all lowercase, so you’ll need to lowercase what you enter to log in a second time.