SULEKHA SUCKS and SULEKHA knows it!

Update on 3/29/2005 12:30:00 PM:

I posted the link to this blog on Sulekha weblogs on March 28th, 2005 and it was deleted!

Message to Sulekha:
Why was the link to this blog on Sulekha weblogs deleted? Just because it tells the truth and Sulekha knows it? So, Sulekha won't let us tell the truth on their weblogs now. This is yet another reason why Sulekha SUCKS!

Sulekha and I are not the only ones who know that Sulekha SUCKS. Check the comment posted on this blog. Quite a few Sulekha bloggers have moved out and are posting on Dud Sea Scrawls, which is hosted on Blogger.com!

Warning to Sulekha:
The first time, I posted the following only on Sulekha weblogs. Sulekha deleted it. So, I had to host the content here and post a link on Sulekha weblogs. If Sulekha continues to delete the link I post on Sulekha weblogs, I will be compelled to post the link on many more forums on the Net.

Original blog posted on 3/28/2005 06:34:00 PM:

On March 27th 2005, I posted a blog on Sulekha weblogs and someone from Sulekha deleted it! I am reposting the contents of that deleted blog below, as closely as I can remember. To be polite to Sulekha, I originally posted the blog only on Sulekha weblogs and not on my personal blog here on Blogger.com. Sulekha, which knows no respect and courtesy, deleted my blog.

Well, bad move, Sulekha! You leave me with no choice but to post here on Blogger.com that SULEKHA SUCKS AND SULEKHA knows it! Incidentally, the title of the deleted blog was "Notes from my experience with Blogger.com" or something similarly simple and neutral.

What follows is a close reproduction of what I had posted yesterday, March 27th 2005, on Sulekha weblogs:

About a month ago, I stopped hosting my blogs on Sulekha weblogs section (I am deliberately not providing a link to Sulekha here) and moved to Blogger.com. I made this move because Sulekha edited one of my blogs without asking or notifying me. (You can read the background to that here: Moving out of Sulekha weblogs). Following are some of the notes from my month-long experience:

1. The look and feel of this blog, hosted on Blogger.com is much much better than Sulekha's simplistic and primitive weblog.

2. My blog has its own unique URL (http://libranlover.blogspot.com), which makes it very easy and convenient for me to share my blog with people. I can even post my blog's unique URL on message boards, as part of the signature in my emails, and on various other forums which market websites, getting exposure and visits to my blogs. This is so unlike Sulekha blogs where a person has to come and search for your blogs buried among hundreds of others.

3. The editor on Blogger.com is far better than Sulekha's archaic, outdated editor. Blogger.com's editor allows you to play easily with different fonts, sizes, styles, templates to help you get effect you want. It has other tools which make it easy to insert hyperlinks into your blogs, block-quote text, have bullet-lists and numbered-lists. You cannot even compare that with Sulekha's pathetic text-only editor, which is a very very tiny window that displays just 8-lines at a time. Why don't they at least make that window bigger?

4. Blogger.com has the awesome feature to post pictures. Yay! I am more a written words person than a pictures person. So, I have made limited use of this feature. But I would love to see fellow Sulekha bloggers go wild with this feature.

5. You can even post audio on Blogger.com! It is not a very advanced feature though. You have to call a 661 US area code phone number and record your audio blog over the phone. It is not even a toll-free number. I wish they also had the option to record audio blogs through the mic connected to a computer. I sound better when I record my singing through the mic, than on the phone. Well, something is better than nothing! One of these days, I will sing on my blog. However, I think my first audio blog is going to be stupid reports from a party in which we tried to get drunk and failed!

6. My next comment is about my beloved Sulekha readers' comments or rather dearth of it: Ever since I moved to Blogger.com about a month ago, I have had over 800 visits to this blog and I know that most of my readers are my friends from Sulekha. However, the number of comments people have left on this blog are quite low. I wouldn't think much about it, if people generally did not leave comments. But people who are quite unhesitant and prolific about leaving comments on Sulekha weblogs, don't do that on my blog here. I don't understand why. What is the hesitation? Can someone tell me?

7. Anonymous comments! Blogger.com allows one to post comments anonymously. There have been a few anonymous comments on my blogs which are quite personal. It would be nice to know who posted those comments. I am not asking for the reader's name, last name, the whole story with kula-gothra. Just the reader's Sulekha handle would suffice. Imagine getting an anonymous email, which has personal comments in it. Wouldn't you be disconcerted? I don't mind anonymous comments which are non-personal and generic.

8. I am very happy with hosting my blog on Blogger.com. I feel safe and free. I don't have to worry that some insecure, discourteous moron from Sulekha will edit my posts or delete them. It would be great if the Sulekha bloggers tried Blogger.com and experienced the wonderful features for themselves. I know that at least one other Sulekha blogger, d_w, also posts on here. However, he does not share his Blogger.com blog's links on Sulekha, like I do. So, I won't post his blog's link here.

9. If Sulekha cannot provide great features with its own weblog tool, it should seriously consider doing what I am doing: Sulekha should encourage its bloggers to host their blogs on Blogger.com, and share their links on Sulekha weblogs page. Sulekha could easily continue to provide the feature of displaying the blog title, along with the first few lines of the blogs, on its blog listing page. There are simple, ready-to-use tools available to do this. This makes everyone a winner: the bloggers get the best world-class features, Blogger.com gets more users and Sulekha continues to have its vibrant blogger community intact.

10. In its current form, Sulekha's weblog feature SUCKS and Sulekha knows it. To make that worse, SULEKHA SUCKS because of its discourtesy and disregard for its user community, the very same community which makes Sulekha what it is today. I have said this before and I say it again, Sulekha's user community is the probably the only good thing about it.