Researching Opera Blog

Back in 1999, I created a Yahoo Group with my cousin and some friends of mine. A few years later we needed more features, so we moved over to MSN Groups. A year or two later, we decided that we needed to take the concept further and created a vBulletin forum board with a e107 front page. That was very successful in many ways and served us well, including the addition of many new members over the years.

Back in June 2005, I had an idea for how to take our Forum website to the next level. My idea was that everyone should have their own blog page with a central community as well. I struggled with getting a handle on the exact idea over the next few months, but couldn't really find anything that was close to what I had in mind.

That is until I discovered Opera Blogs and Groups a few weeks ago. I sat down last night and really research it and was totally impressed. This was IT. The idea that I had been searching for all these month.

One thing that really sold me also is the RSS feeds. I researched that as well in Opera 8.51 browser, as well as Newsfire aggregator for Mac OS X and News Reader 1.1 dashboard widget. I knew there were RSS news aggregators as well for all flavs of Windows, and through more research found a Combarss widget for Konfabulator. One of the goals was to find widgets for Mac and Windows, so that friends could check each other's blogs for new posts and not have to visit them everyday.

This certainly all looks promising so far...