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Blogger Doesn't Suck Anymore or: How I Spent My Christmas Holiday

Until recently, if you were an aspiring blogger and you asked me my opinion of the blogging software Blogger, I would have gone into a mini rant about how surprisingly clunky and user-unfriendly it is, especially considering it is hugely popular and owned by Google.

Then I would have added that, of course, you get what you pay for. (Blogger is free.) And finally I would have suggested that you’d be better off paying $5 a month for a service like TypePad instead.

That was until this past Christmas.

In December, Blogger officially launched their new – and vastly improved – software, and I had a really good chance to give it a workout since I spent some of my Christmas holiday helping my Dad set up his first blog, In A Mellow Tone. (He prefers to call it a Website, but that’s another story…)

The new Blogger is much easier to use (especially for non-technical folks) and offers some customization and configuration features that rival those of paid services like TypePad. Best of all, it’s still free.

For full-blown professional or corporate blogs, I still recommend more robust and configurable paid services like TypePad and Movable Type (along with WordPress, which is ‘free’ but requires considerable technical prowess). However, for personal or modest little blogs like my Dad’s, the new Blogger offers more than enough bells and whistles and is extremely easy to use.

If you haven’t played around with the new Blogger yet, I highly recommend it. It’s a great way to start the New Year.

2 Comments

  1. Marc Poirier
    Marc Poirier January 8, 2007

    Hey there Bill!
    First of all Happy New Year to you and the onedegree community.
    Here is my experience with these tools. I have been using blogger for 2 or 3 years now on my blog (http://marc.poirier.com).
    I took part in the beta program for the new blogger, which I like very much, but I’m going to switch over to WordPress when I have a little bit of free time.
    I want to start taking advantage of social media a little bit more, and blogger seems a little restrictive in its featureset.
    WordPress is open source, and the community offers many different plugins to extend its functionality. For example, on our company blog (where we use wordpress), we wanted to connect to our flickr albums to show pictures of the tradeshows we attend. It turns out there are several different plugins out there to connect to flickr and display images inside your blog.
    I don’t really know TypePad, I’m not a professional blogger either, I just wanted to share my experience with wordpress.
    Once again, have a great 2007 everyone, wishing you all the best!

  2. Arieh Singer
    Arieh Singer January 8, 2007

    It is neat Blogger has upgraded their services – they were in need of one. I began using blogger a few years ago but when I purchased my own domain I began working with WordPress. I found that even though I didn’t have the coding background, I was able to work with the software quite easily. My Dreamhost one-click install also made it quite effortless to setup.
    The best part of WordPress though, was that I could tap into the open-source community and get help when needed. Any coding issues/problems/hints I needed, that I couldn’t source myself online, I posted on a forum and within a few hours I was being helped by the community – which in turn helps others.
    This is something that the Blogger community doesn’t have. That and the fact that I wanted to have control of my posts and be able to fully delete them if need be!

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