JLP’s Blog

When I started my career (if you can call it so) as a blogger, my first publishing system of choice was Google’s Blogger. I was happy with it until I published two parts of a very successful article titled JLP’s KDE 3.5 Previews. The story even made it to Slashdot and then the problems started. Blogger, at that time, didn’t have any anti comments spam system in place. All you could do is turn off comments completely. After all the spamming at that time I started to look for alternatives. I’ve checked out many of them and in the end I was by far the most impressed with Wordpress. Very powerful, flexible and lots of great looking themes and plug-ins.

Why am I telling you this? Well, after a promising start, the developers of Blogger more or less stopped working on it. No interesting new features, no new themes and people that stayed with Blogger had to wait quite a long time until they got a half decent anti-spam system. But it finally looks like that the developers are waking up from their sleep as they have just released a new (beta) version of Blogger. There are now new templates, more options to customise your template, support for more writers, more control over who can view posts, more feed options and the publishing is now instant (no more of the stupid “Republish entire blog” thing ). You can read some more in the Blogger new features tour and on the Google Operating System blog.

Will all this make me switch back to Blogger? Off course not. Wordpress is still a whole lot better. I highly recommend it if you are a more serious blogger and have access to a server that runs or can run Wordpress. But these, long overdue, enhancements to Blogger are sure welcome for people who are using it, or for those who are thinking about starting blogging and are looking for a good service. Let’s just hope Google continues working on it more actively in the future.

Tags: blogger, google, blogging, blog, blogs, wordpress, internet