Review ILoveBlog Free Blog Hosting

Looking for free blog hosting? We knew blogger.com and WordPress.com, here is another free blog hosting — ILoveBlog.com. ILoveBlog is a free blog (as well as photos and audio) hosting from Exabytes, a famous web hosting company in Malaysia. The website is powered by Calliope Blogs script.

Image: screenshot of iloveblog blog

ILoveBlog features

• Use own domain or free sub-domain (yourname.iloveblog.com)
• Free email redirection (yourname@iloveblog.com)
• Ability to setup multiple blogs
• Access control over your blogs, photos and audio gallery
• Blog via email
• 100MB space
• 1000MB bandwidth

What makes ILoveBlog stand out from its competitors is that, ILoveBlog support photo albums and audio gallery out of the box. The photo and audio can also easily integrated into your blog post.

Flash photo viewer

Image: iloveblog flash photo viewer

I like the ILoveBlog flash photo viewer. Beside showing small thumbnails of the photo album on left hand side, you can also call out comment box and photo info box which are floated (and movable) on the photo.

Music and Podcast

Image: iloveblog music player

ILoveBlog provides a music player where you can upload your songs and sort into a playlist. It also supports podcasting by uploading your recorded audio files. Oh, I am amazed by the smooth playback of the flash player, over my slow broadband speed!

ILoveBlog dashboard

Image: iloveblog dashboard

ILoveBlog dashboard is the place where you can control user access to your blog, set privileged groups, change account settings, and check blog usage and statistics.

ILoveBlog Edit Mode

Image: iloveblog blog edit mode

In ILoveBlog, it is very easy to customize your blog layout. You don’t even need to know any HTML code! Clicking the Edit link at the top left corner will turn your blog into Edit mode with an Edit menu, and all the blog objects such as header, background image, etc) become editable. The option window is opened as float window. Neat!

Image: many background images to choose from

ILoveBlog Blog Editor

Image: iloveblog blog WYSIWYG editor

The ILoveBlog blog editor is simple and easy to use. It is a WYSIWYG editor by default, which is easy for most users. I want to highlight the three links at top right corner: Insert photo, Insert Audio, and Insert Video.

Insert photo allows you to insert photo to your blog post from your iloveblog photo album, and even online photo album such as Flickr, 23hq, and fotothing. For Flickr, you can insert your own flickr photos or do a tag search for others’ pictures. It is cool! Oh, you can upload your own picture as well, of course.

Insert Audio allows you to upload a song or attach a song in your music album by adding a flash audio player into your blog post. Wow!

Insert Video is a very handy feature to easily insert online video into your blog post. It supports videos from YouTube, Google Video and MetaCafe. Simply copy and paste the video url, click “Insert” button and a video player is inserted into your blog post. That’s easy!

ILoveBlog blog editor also supports tags, trackbacks and groups access restriction. You can also grant temporary access to other people by adding their email addresses. However, I don’t see blog post preview is available. After a blog post published, you have the option to notify your friends by email.

Here is my ILoveBlog sample blog post

My two cents

In a nutshell, ILoveBlog is very easy to use and great for non-HTML bloggers and beginners. It makes information sharing becomes easy. I love the Insert photo/video/audio feature. Other blogging platforms should have them too! Although, the blog space/bandwidth is not plenty but it is enough for a personal blog.

If you are looking for a free blog hosting that is easy, simple and features rich, try ILoveBlog! :)

This is a sponsored review. Disclosure Policy