Back to Blogger!

Wow, a few years ago, I never thought I would actually come back to Blogger. As many may know, the Blogger situation not too long ago was pretty bleak. Blogger had been purchased by Google, and was sitting tight as one of the first blogging services while new and much better services launched. Blogger had become very outdated and stale, especially in comparison with the features offered by sites like Wordpress.com. However, a few months ago, Blogger rolled out version 2.0, complete with some pretty nifty new features that in many respects, actually have surpassed that of Wordpress. Now, if I wanted to host my own blog, I would unquestionably choose Wordpress. There is no doubt that it is more powerful in its capabilities than Blogger. However, its interesting to note a role reversal: now Wordpress.com (hosted Wordpress) is stale and Blogger has re-gained the crown, at least for me. Here are some of the new features that attracted me back to Blogger:

• Better theme support (allowing actual theme edits without paying)
• Better widget/script support (embedded javascript widgets and the like had problems on Wordpress)
• Google integration (with Docs, GrandCentral, AdSense, etc. - always a plus!)
• Post by email (to post while on the go from my iPhone - here's hoping Google creates a Blogger iPhone app!)
• Custom domain support (to use my fancy domain name, without ads or a titlebar)

It would be fantastic if everything could be perfect, but things never are. Right? Just in the few short areas I've been using Blogger, I've noticed some room for improvement - mostly within the "create a post" editor. For example, it would be nice to have some more formatting options (underline) and multiple levels for bullets. However, these can be accomplished with HTML code.

Note: I'm in the process of moving posts from my Wordpress.com hosted blog to this new Blogger blog, so things may be unstable for the next few days and all posts may not be available.