Why I chose Google Blogger

The decision to start blogging had come to me a long time ago. I had developed blogs before but did not fully understand the shear amount of time involved with creating and posting to one regularly.

After shelving my ambitions for a year and doing more research/reading I decided to pull the trigger and fully devote myself to blogging on a topic that I am passionate about. I have to admit that I am excited and slightly intimidated to put myself out there.

Unlike a lot of bloggers who begin on a whim - choose a blog publishing solution and move on, I actually evaluated a handful of them for a year before deciding on my choice.

I looked into typepad, blogger, wordpress, and social network blogs like myspace and xanga. I also tried open source content management blogs like Joomla with varied results for each.

What pushed me over the edge was the new Google Blogger.

The first conclusion that I came to was that I did not want to mess with hosting if I didn't have to. I fully understand the implications with not hosting my blog myself - but it would actually be a hinderance to me. I would probably end up spending all my time customizing the application instead of writing anything.

Another conclusion that I came to was that I didn't want to pay anything. I like free applications and open source software - so being a cheap ass definitely played a part.

The social network blogs were weak in their extensibility...and the content management was overkill.

But I wasn't sold on blogger until the "new blogger" came out.

The first (and obvious) benefit was the integration with my Google account which is great because I hop between my google apps quite frequently.

But the most impressive changes were the way in which a person with html experience can build out their own blog templates and edit the styles from within the interface. This is great if I decide I want to change colors or fonts of particular content - I can specify the variable in my blogger template and update it anytime without having to edit the css again. This may come from the fact that I have a graphic design background and get bored easily with the look and feel - so this was a nice feature.

I also love that I can use my own domain. I didnt want a blogspot address (there was no way I would have that) and I was going to go with a different application based solely on that fact. But new blogger beat me to the punch and fixed it before I had come to any definite conclusions.

The widget options were nice and suited most of my needs. I rarely found an app or widget that I could not easily integrate into the new blogger. And most 3rd party widgets are custom configured for blogger and wordpress which made extending the template very easy.

Overall, I found that the new blogger was more than suited for what I wanted to accomplish. It provides me the freedom to build out cool, custom templates and add new features on the fly. The functionality is what you would expect and provides very few limitations.

Now I understand that pro bloggers out there will decry me for placing my uptime/downtime into google's hands, but some of the best blogs I read are good old blogger blogs with the blogspot address. And I have seen both uptime and downtime for blogs from every stripe. I am not looking to become a powerhouse blogmaster with 10 blogs...I dont have that kind of time and I if I did I would be golfing instead.

So I chose the new blogger and I have to say that i am very pleased with it so far.

Let me know what you think - do you use blogger? or did you come to a different conclusion?