After 4 years of maintaining Movable Type on my web server, I've decided to switch to Blogger. Moveable Type was just becoming a maintenance nightmare, and it was easier to move than to get it back into working condition. I'm still maintaining my son's blog in Movable Type, but I'm shutting down my photography blog. Since I started using flickr, I really hadn't been maintaining it anyway. I may start posting pictures here instead. My thoughts so far:

• The author's interface in Blogger is a decade ahead of MovableType. That alone made it worth the switch. The blogger interface is similar to that of most Google services. Very smooth and clean.
• None of Bloggers templates were wide enough to display landscape flickr images. Altering an existing one to fit took about an hour of tinkering (resizing images, took most of the time). Now I won't be able to switch themes again without sitting back down in front of Photoshop. Kind of a pain.
• There were a lot more publishing options with Blogger than I expected. I haven't used a free hosting service since before Geocities was bought up by Yahoo. I hadn't expected it to cater to secure-ftp or hosted domains.
• The help on Blogger is pretty good, but I would have loved a feature matrix showing the pros and cons of each hosting method. I had find out which to use by trial and error.

I'm looking forward to getting rid of this template and putting something together that's a little more personalized, but for now, at least I'm not spending time removing spam from my comments.

Labels: Blogging

posted by Bryan at 10:32 PM