i blog the i.ph

I’ve been asked to by fellow-PTB blogger, J Angelo, to write my thoughts about i.ph . I told him I would do that but I was quick to add that I’ll “tell it as it is” whether upside or downside.

In the next few weeks, expect some articles about i.ph . I’m looking forward to taking the i.ph CMS for a ride too. But let’s start from the very beginning… a very good place to start ...

i.ph – First impressions

Let me quiz myself first and try to recall what I know about i.ph without looking at any web references.

I first heard about i.ph from an Airfagev friend, Randy Nivales. He uploaded a couple of our Airfagev EB photos on his i.ph photo album. The album had an organized layout, not cluttered. It looked very clean and spiffy.

Ah, first impressions last. I had a feeling the design people behind i.ph had put in a lot of thought into the look of i.ph .

So what is i.ph? It’s a blogging service by Dot.ph, the domain name registry for the Philippines. I remember that behind i.ph was a content management system (CMS) called “Calliope”. Sounds foreign-jer, doesn’t it? The whole time, I thought that it was French or Italian. Only recently did I discover that Calliope is a locally developed CMS. And it’s been two years in the making, I hear. Whew! It’s been in the making that long and I came to know about it only about ten months ago?! Where’s it been for so long?

Among the first things I checked out about the i.ph blogging service was whether it was free or not. At that time, there were no free accounts. My thinking was this: given my existing Technobiography blog in free service blogger.com, I don't see any reasons for me to shift to i.ph . That’s still the position I maintain. But I’m open. Especially when I’ve seen recently that i.ph has opened options for free accounts. Ah… free … my most favorite price in the whole entire world. Let’s check that out later.

I also remember writing about i.ph in a previous Technobiography article. I believe it was about audio blogging or video blogging. I do remember seeing a video of an i.ph blogger on top of a mountain.

Hmmmm… i.ph is up to something, I thought. i.ph was starting to look like a blogging service that would do well for blogs with a lot of multi-media content.

Oh, yes, I remember one more thing. I remember being visited by an i.ph blogger. He left a comment on Technobiography. But the comment looked to me as rather impersonal. I felt that he didn’t read my blog, and instead just wanted me to visit his blog. I brushed it off, maximum tolerance for blog visitors, that's what I do. I even replied to him on his blog, if I remember correctly. I found out later on that he was making the rounds among pinoy bloggers. Even read about him getting into a tussle with a blogging biggie. Tsk tsk, not good.

Nevertheless, writing about i.ph is something I can help out with. I won’t be one sided, I will “tell it as it is”. I’ll be critical too and will arm myself with a favorite quotation for times like this: “It is easier to be critical than to be correct!” ;-)

Finished or not finished, pass your papers!

And that’s what I remember about i.ph .

In my next article, let’s see how many correct answers I got. And let’s see if I could find other first impressions of i.ph from fellow pinoy bloggers. I wonder too if there are some i.ph users from other countries. Let’s see.

Ka edong
black i.ph
“Where is the love … where is the love, the love, the love ….”