Since late 2008 Free (1) offers a new platform of blogs to its users. It is powered by Dotclear 2, a well-known solution of the French users. Free joins the myriad of hand-key solutions to manage its online blogs. Like his colleagues - Tumblr or Blogger or Skyblog or canalblog or Overblog or Centerblog or Unblog or EklaBlog or ... - an online solution has many advantages. Firstly there is no need to install something so that they avoid the situation of "putting fingers in the grease". Moreover updates of the software solution are performed by the host. The downside is obviously that we don't have a total control over everything as we will report back.

First of all it is mandatory to subscribe to the service on the Free website and retrieve his ID and password sent by e-amil. So far nothing unusual, then you can login to the administration page of his blog. The interface is also left as it was conceived by Dotclear: in the center of a blank page.

Here we are in the blog administration itself. This includes the various tools in the center of the page, as icons, and direct access to each item in a menu on the left. To the right of those icons, the latest news inform the blogger of the news and possible information sources about Dotclear. Below the icons, a field "Quick Entry" allows to immediately start writing an article. Good point for bloggers very very very very rushed. But compared to the time required to write an article, is it a real advantage?

The way of writing is very conventional with a word processor like editor that will not disorient those accustomed to word processors. One would note the presence of an interesting little "XHTML Validation" link at the bottom of the page to quickly verify that the text complies well with W3C standards.

The rest of the article management is simple and intuitive. The novice user should not meet any particular problem.

We arrive at the most interesting part without a doubt for advanced users: widgets. It is there that will find all the little additions to the blog. These elements will make its navigation and its interaction richer, but also perhaps make the design overloaded. It is very simple in its usage: the left column gives a list of all available widgets, then a simple "click/drag/drop" in one of the other columns will be enough to add the widget in the navigation bar or in the outer banner. Inversely, to delete one, simply place it back in the left column. Unfold the widget with the "+" to configure it. It's simple and effective.

And now about design, let's talk about what is the most important topic on WD4All! The solution adopted by Freeis to offer a small library of templates with a series of designs more or less happy ... Some are really nice, some really ugly...

One detail really curious: you can view the CSS part of the selected template! It is a bit austere like that, especially since it is impossible to change the css code! I do not perceive very well the usefulness of such a function.

To put his own design, Free offers an empty template! It's not really pleasant to use for a beginner in CSS, especially since the austere interface does not really invite programming. It is also not possible to save more! Farewell, christmas design prepared to succeed to the one with late summer colors. It is also impossible to access the html of the blog! Again this is a limitation of Free and not of Dotclear 2.

In conclusion, it is undeniable that the offer of Free is interesting except for the design: these blogs are rather reserved for computer noobs. On the contrary when it comes to design, you'll need to have strong skills in CSS. It's a shame to curb so a technical yet powerful solution in many respects. This situation is not without recalling their freebox that is impossible to set-up locally: one needs to actually do the set-up through his Internet account but reboot the box by manually unplug it. What good is a remote setup if the reboot is not operable at a distance? It may be a specialty from free to offer good technical solutions but to distort them through an illogical process ...

(1) Free is a french internet provider