Blogging with Blogger
16 March 2009
I love Blogger, it’s just easy to get along with. You click a few buttons, type a few words and hey presto. It’s linked to my Google account so I don’t have to mess around with registering again. However, it doesn’t get a lot of love from the web-dev community. I’m not sure if that’s just it’s association with Google or just because it’s not WordPress.
Okay it’s not perfect. For instance the control you have is limited. I’m sure it’s not hard to create a template and get Blogger to output clean and valid code, but doing that would miss the point for why I use it in the first place. I’m using it because I want something easy, tried, and tested, not because I want something specific and labourious.
It’s enevitable that I’m going to wake up on a Saturday with nothing to do, bored out of my face, and end up creating my own layout. I enjoy creating websites and pages – I don’t get out much! But Blogger isn’t for the side of me that wants total control of every tag that leaves the server. I’m not even sure if I can get that control out of WordPress (I haven’t used it much). Maybe I’ll prefer Movable type. Then there’s the balance – ease of use versus control. If I wanted so much control, I might aswell build the blog myself, or write it out as static pages. Obviously there’s a lot of work in that, the kind of work that Blogger has always kindly kept hidden away for you. I respect that.
I guess the only thing I can do is try and test the front and back of a few CMS. Have a play and a dig. I’ll get some skinning done before hand. I’d want any clean output to be compatible with any CSS theme I write. Ofcourse I’m assuming both WordPress and Moveable Type spit out beutifully clean and sparkling XHTML. From what their fanbase of zealots are screaming about, I’d bloody hope it does.
Feature list wise I’ve got a few preferences. I’d want to get URLs like I like em. Obviously with blogs there are many ways to point to posts (category, tags, date, alphabetical, etc) but to be honest I’d probably have a simple ‘jack.co.uk/blog/title-goes-here’ URL for every post. Maybe some social linking. There’s gonna be a lot of hacking going on…
Anyway, I’m sure you’ll hear something about it soon!