Blogger
Monday, January 14, 2008
Blogger
Choosing a hosted service for blogging was a matter of a few minutes, and it didn't involve working through feature lists and comparison charts.
I started playing with Blogger and within minutes had a basic template and publishing to my Web server working. The template language looked sufficiently flexible, and the backing by search giant Google made this an attractive choice too.
WordPress would have been next on my review list. The hosted options are probably comparable, with WordPress offering some advanced features for a fee. Anita Campbell has published a great article about moving a blog from Blogger to WordPress, citing a number of good reasons why the latter is a much better option, although Blogger was “simple to set up and use”. Good enough for me.
One minor limitation I noticed is that Blogger only creates a single XML feed but no category feeds, which can be created easily using the rich Blogger data API.
The only complaint I have about Blogger is the incorrect rendering of ampersand and angle quotes:
They are represented correctly as entities in the XML feed, but rendered as plain characters in the HTML version. This looks like a bug that should be easy enough to fix.
I started playing with Blogger and within minutes had a basic template and publishing to my Web server working. The template language looked sufficiently flexible, and the backing by search giant Google made this an attractive choice too.
WordPress would have been next on my review list. The hosted options are probably comparable, with WordPress offering some advanced features for a fee. Anita Campbell has published a great article about moving a blog from Blogger to WordPress, citing a number of good reasons why the latter is a much better option, although Blogger was “simple to set up and use”. Good enough for me.
One minor limitation I noticed is that Blogger only creates a single XML feed but no category feeds, which can be created easily using the rich Blogger data API.
The only complaint I have about Blogger is the incorrect rendering of ampersand and angle quotes:
- Ampersand: &
- Angle bracket open: <
- Angle bracket close: >
They are represented correctly as entities in the XML feed, but rendered as plain characters in the HTML version. This looks like a bug that should be easy enough to fix.
Labels: google, technology