Checking out blogging services: Blogger

Blogger logo

Blogger has been out there for the longest time. At first it was Pyra handling it but later on Google bought it and now has integrated other services with it. During the early days of Google Mail, they were giving invites to Blogger users. Nowadays you could even have your own Google Adsense account when you sign up for the Blogger service.

Blogger has a simple user interface as you have a dashboard from which you manage your account. Even if you have a lot of accounts on Blogger, you could manage all of them using Blogger’s Dashboard.

One of the nifty things you could do with Blogger is set it up such that your files are on your webhost. Even for free webhosting services, this works without much trouble. That is why it is quite easy for some people to integrate their blogs on to their personal sites. Some who want their portfolios and blog all on one site so they could easily manage them and make backups would do this.

Layout tweaking is also easy with Blogger templates. As long as you have some basic HTML and CSS knowledge. (Or you could also learn a bit!) You could either choose to tweak an existing Blogger template that you are using for your blog but you could also choose to have a free template. All over the Internet, people publish their own templates for free as long as you give them credit for the use. Aside from that, there are many Blogger hacks available online.

One of the things I don’t quite like about Blogger though, is that you can’t have categories per se. Unlike the tagging mechanism on Livejournal, you have to do some hacking with del.icio.us or something just to have the categories.

The nice thing about Blogger is that they also made ways for users to deal with spam. They have an implementation of Captcha that you could opt to have on your blog. You could also limit commenting to people who are registered on Blogger.

[tags]blogging,blogs[/tags]

Originally posted on August 6, 2006 @ 6:19 pm