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What is your favourite service for bloggers and why? What features do you like/dislike in your current service?

I'm currently using blogger.com and it has no native support for syntax highlighting of posted blocks of code.

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closed as off topic by ChrisF, Daniel Beck, AndrejaKo, random♦ Jan 10 '11 at 1:53

Questions on Super User are expected to generally relate to computer software or computer hardware, within the scope defined in the faq.

6 Answers

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I've gone the path of writing/maintaining my own blogging tool, then migrating to Wordpress, then finally migrating to Blogger.

In the beginning I wrote my own tool. It was very simple and didn't do even 10% of what most other platforms do; but I wrote it myself because I had the time and the interest in doing so.

After a while I found that having to extend/modify/fix my tool every time I wanted to do something different got tiring, so I started using a self-hosted WordPress instead. This gave me out-of-the-box functionality, a developer community which was making new things and fixing old security holes, and a theming community which let me customize my blog the way I wanted it.

As it happens, this turned out to be a big mistake. The problem is that the theming community isn't really joined to the developers; so in my case I ended picking, then customizing, a theme which ended up not being compatible with (or upgraded to be compatible with) a major rev of Wordpress. I also ended up with a couple of extensions which ended up not being compatible with the upgrade trail. Worse, I had these features that I wanted in this old history that I could not preserve had I decided to move to the new upgrade.

While it might be possible that I would port either my data or my theme to the new upgrade, in practice I'm not really that good a coder and frankly I don't have that kind of time anymore. Besides, the thought of going through this kind of pain on a frequent basis (since that's how often WordPress updates were coming, at the time) turned my stomach.

Blogging was becoming a chore, again.

And while I waffled on what to do, eventually my blog got compromised by a bot of some kind and many of my posts ended up with hidden porno links in them.

So down came Wordpress, along with all 850 odd posts of history in it.

I looked at a bunch of options: running the 'bliki software I was using as a wiki and using the built-in 'blog functionality; upgrading to Wordpress-Current; using the Wordpress.com service; and using Blogger.

After trying Wordpress.com I decided that Blogger was the least painful option. Why?

  • it's free
  • it has a reasonable subset of features (or at least I can work around the brokeness of the features there)
  • it treats me as a "user", not a sysadmin/dbadmin/webmaster
  • I'll never have to worry about "security updates" or any of that kind of crap
  • I'll never have to worry about incompatible themes, because I've picked and customized one of their out-of-the-box themes
  • it's Google, so it will be always available, and will be kept around forever (or at least until it isn't)

It isn't a very flexible blogging tool, and there are limits to what you can do with it. I personally can't make the "Compose Mode" do what I want it to, but since it lets me edit the HTML directly I can usually get what I want displayed. But it is simple enough that my wife can get it to do what she wants it to to.

Your mileage will assuredly vary.

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up vote 18 down vote

I use WordPress: http://wordpress.com/

It is very customizable and easy to use.

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It also allows you to do syntax highlighting using [sourcecode] tags in your posts, which highlights the code with the Google syntax highlighter: code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter – Alex Rozanski Jul 19 '09 at 19:18
I've personally found WordPress too bloated for simple blogs, but maybe that's just me. – musicfreak Jul 19 '09 at 19:31
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I tried out Wordpress based on your advice. It doesn't allow you to edit the site CSS without paying for it. That is pretty big deal con for me. – James McMahon Jul 25 '09 at 23:31
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You can install on your own host and edit css as you please. It's pretty easy to install and setup...babies do it. – Sam Aug 5 '09 at 19:54
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up vote 6 down vote

Tumblr

You can post anything, themes, post by email, has bookmarklets, etc. It's a very good service.

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up vote 5 down vote

I use blogger.com to and I'm satisfied with it.

But if you want to still use Blogger and your OS is Windows, try MS Live Writer.

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Windows Live Writer is a desktop client for blogging, not really a service like Blogger or Wordpress. – Isxek Jul 19 '09 at 20:02
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up vote 5 down vote

Regardless of tool, I suggest you host your own from the start rather than rely on sites like wordpress.com and blogger.com to host it. This will give you a DNS record that you own, and will make switching blogging engines later easier if you'll want to, without losing pagerank.

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up vote 2 down vote

I migrated my Blogger blog to WordPress only to find that the WordPress.com site doesn't support flash. You have to pay for that service or pay to host it somewhere else and install the add-on.

I also really resented having to pay in order to have access to the CSS for the theme I had chosen.

Blogger supports flash and let's me customize my theme at no additional charge.

I went back to Blogger and have no desire to go back to WordPress.

I use the Scribefire add-on for Firefox. Works like a charm.

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