free blog publishing

Back in the day when I was living in San Francisco Bay Area, when Silicon Valley seemed like heaven and dotcom was booming, purely driven by curiosity with no real intention of keeping up blogging, I had signed up for a Blogger account - when it was still Pyra labs and not bought by Google...

I had nothing to complain as I wasn't really blogging, I was hosting the blogs on my own domain and kept it well-hidden.

Then, there was the big crash, I moved, was unemployed for a while, and was trying to find myself, so, blogging was the last thing on my mind...

Last year, I finally picked up some courage and decided to share my recipes on my blog - nothing fancy - wasn't even sure if anybody would care... but, many gracious visitors did and am grateful - it helped fuel my passion for cooking...

Now that my recipes blog Delectable Victuals has become my favorite place to spend a few evenings and weekends, I am beginning to feel the inadequacy of the current blog publishing tool.

I rather like the fact that there are cool tools readily available in other blog hosting and publishing services so I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel and maintain my own publishing system on my server. Therefore, I thought about moving my blog over to say WordPress... they've made it pretty painless to import.

Mostly inertia, but, also, having developed a relationship with my blog pals and regular readers, it would be a pain to move my recipe blog over and have all the links change and have people update their bookmarks and such...

Also, Blogger has my loyalty so far - I don't have much to complain except the outtages on and off...

And summing up the pros and cons of WP and Blogger - just the free hosted blogs - I am leaning towards Blogger anyway...

While Blogger and WP are both equally good for the free hosted publishing, for customizing the look and feel, Blogger is better as I get to meddle with the raw HTML/CSS (WP does not give access to raw HTML/CSS for free as far as I gather).

But, as far as plug-ins go, cool tools/widgets etc are made for WP more than Blogger as WP is open source and easier to develop for...

However, Blogger allows free advertising on the *.blogspot.com free blogs, and as far as I gather WP does not.

WP has trackback, Blogger does not, not that that is a bad thing... So, for a site with minimum maintenance WP is better; for a site that is easily customizable in terms of look and feel Blogger is better, I think...

Plus, Blogger allows JavaScript, WP does not (as far as I know). However, WP lets you add "About" and such pages to the blog, and nav, built-in. Blogger does not have it built-in - but, Blogger is so flexible that one can create one's own nav bar with tabs to boot.

And, Blogger lets you have more than one blog in the same account - WP allows one blog per account as far as I know.

My vote at this point would be to stay on Blogger as I can meddle with customizing the look and feel - gives me greater flexibility...

WP would get my vote only because things are already done and packaged in a clean manner - one need not (cannot) mess with it much, and thereby makes it easy to maintain.

Bah! Who the heck cares! Am not even sure how long I am going to keep this blog up...