Gandi Bar

How? It's very easy : go to the control panel of one of your domains ; at the bottom, in the "Technical Settings" section, you will find a link to activate your blog.

Attention: You have to be registered with us as the owner of the domain in order to activate your blog. You can choose to activate your blog under your domain name, or under a related sub-domain. You can either use Gandi's DNS or use your own, by following the instructions during the activation process.

Why GandiBlog, you ask ? A good question. Why do we offer a blog service? To be "in"? So people will talk about us? To sell domain names? To upset expensive and settled monopolies? Why not?

Let's be frank, such a service is a very good way to gain new customers (especially since we don't advertise at all, and don't believe in lobbying). But blogs are first and foremost in line with Gandi's spirit; a very performant and simple tool.

What is GandiBlog? It is a platform based on the DotClear 2 free software, which offers a good number of interresting functions.

• With GandiBlog, you can write tickets and receive comments. Yes, yes, it's true, no need to thank us
• A category system.
• A tag (or key word) management system. You can add as many tags to a ticket as wanted, and thus offer a new browsing mode on your blog. You can also create a new tag by simply selecting a word in a ticket.
• A very complete media manager, supporting any file type. Naturally, you will be able to attach these files to your tickets and, for example, create podcasts very easily.
• You will be able to protect tickets with a password. You will just need to give the URL and the password to the people you choose.
• A visual editor: if you don't like the Wiki syntax and don't know anything about XHTML, you will still be able to publish You will have acces to a visual editor allowing you to use the most common formatings, to insert images, to create links, lists, etc.
• A link manager allowing to organize a blogroll as you wish.
• Presentation widgets: if the setup of the widgets is not to your liking, a tool will allow you to change everything and add a lot of new widgets soon..
• A spam filter, Spamplemousse, adapted to DotClear 2, which will be soon replaced by an even more efficient filter created by the same designers.

Now that we presented the caractéristics common to DotClear 2 and GandiBlog, let's have a look at what makes GandiBlog special.

• Hosting. You are not a system administrator and the simple mention of a FTP client makes you want to run the other way? You are in good hands. You will not have to install or update the software for your blog, we take care of everything and offer a 1Go disc space and 10Go of bandwidth per month.
• Themes. You are not a graphic designer and the last drawing you made earned you jibes and giggles from your classmates in elementary school? We did not forget you. Talented artists created about 30 different themes. You should be able to find one you like while we work on allowing CSS modifications and maybe templates as well.
• With a domain name. You don't understand the first thing about DNS and the Gandi Support plays darts with your picture as a target ^[1]? Don't panic, you just need to check a box to activate your blog.

GandiBlog is the result of a collective effort, a successful bet between two teams, and in the name of Gandi, I wish to sincerely thank the DotClear team. They invested themself in DotClear 2 while still offering support for the users of the version 1. I would also like to thank Nicolas Martin for all the time spent on the visual editor, the Upian team, Maurice Svay, Laurence Jacquet and Marc Hertzog for the themes, and finally, the happy band who tested the platform blogeoisie.com. Thank you, all of you!