February 3, 2009

Blog Bleg

I'm not entirely satisfied with the technical capabilities of Blogspot. Other bloggers seem to like WordPress. Still others seem to think your blog can only be taken seriously with your own domain name and I don't even know what kind of blog editor. Here's what I'm looking for:
  • Free. I'm not paying anything to maintain a blog that generates no revenue, and I've no desire to make this a commercial site. If that means I need to have a "blogspot.com," "blogger.com," "wordpress.com" or any other embedded name in the URL, that's a bargain I'm willing to make. But this is just a hobby for me and not one I care to invest a ton of money into.
  • Simple interface. Yes, I've picked up a bit of HTML doing the blog so far, but I don't want to spend all night coding in my formatting. I want something that lets me write with something at least resembling the ease of a word processor. All the bells and whistles of Microsoft Word would be nice but are not necessary, as long as I can at least choose between left-justified and center alignment, create hyperlinks, italicize, and boldface.
  • Embeddable graphics and movies. If I embed a YouTube video, I want to be able to wrap text around it. Blogspot cannot do this, so far as I can tell.
  • Attractive, easy-to-read out-of-the-box templates. I'm not going to spend a lot of time designing a template. And I hate Courier font. We humans haven't spent billions of dollars and invested hundreds of thousands of peoples' entire careers to create highly-advanced, fast, and graphically sophisticated computers so that they can produce images that look like they were pounded out on an IBM Selectric circa 1967.
  • Finally, most tricky, and probably the biggest anchor for me staying on blogspot: Migration ability. I've written a considerable body of posts over the past three and a half years; I'm starting to zero in on three thousand. They are mine and I'm proud of them. I want to be able to migrate those posts from the blogspot site to the new one.
If any of you Readers are bloggerheads, techies, IT types, computer geeks, net wizards, or whatever other label you want to attach to being knowlegable about such things, please share your thoughts in the comments section or an e-mail. If you have any ideas that would be a good fit for these criteria, I'm listening. I can live with what I've got right now, but I'm interested in seeing if I can do better.

2 comments:

  1. Daryl2/03/2009 11:44 AM

    Wordpress.com is outstanding, and I suspect they offer import tools from a blogger.com export (I know they do from other formats). Set up an account and play with the interface a bit to see if you like it. One big big caveat: If you do move your blog, you'll take a big search engine optimization hit, or else you'll have people hitting your old posts at blogger.com and never getting forwarded to the new blog unless you do something to all posts to point them to the new blog. (Maybe a template change would facilitate this?) At any rate, if you're thinking of changing things, I'd definitely advocate a change to wordpress.

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  2. DaveBuck2/04/2009 5:42 AM

    fwiw, as a reader, I find this interface easy to use.

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