I had been thinking about it for a long time but somehow I hadn't taken the steps to do it yet; but today is the day!!!
I had my website/blog hosted by weebly for almost two years. I liked it a lot at first. It was easy to use but in time I felt the need to give more prominence to my blog, after all it is the part that is more regularly updated and changed, other more static content does not need much fuss, you can host it anywhere, anyhow.
Weebly has ease of use, which is fine in today's world where we tend to complicate things unnecessarily. But what I did not like about weebly was:
- Often their servers are way too slow. On a daily basis it takes ages to load my homepage.
- Iceweasel is not supported. At the moment of writing this I primarly use Chromium-browser. Which I do not think it is supported either. But previously I used iceweasel a lot. One thing I can assure you. Noone is ever gonna tell me which software I have to use. And that's the truth.
- I think their DNS servers are buggy or something. In my day to day browsing I get too many navigation errors or "Site not published" messages. After reloading a thousand times the site suddenly appears.
- Blogging features are too poor. You can't search older posts. You have to do it manually.
- Their online editor sucks. I have lost too many hours of my precious time writing and rewriting posts because the editor hungs and I have to start all over again. That makes me sick. Once is enough, but it happens once and again.
- You can't backup your blog.
What I love about blogger:
- Powerful editor with the possibility of having "about me" pages.
- Comments spam detection (I deleted my first attempt at blogging with google because of spam)
- Highly configurable.
- Mail2Blogger (also from mobile devices)
- OpenID
- Google gadgets is not bad although not my cup of tea.
- Stats are great!!!
- Preview option
- You can export/import your blog.
The (will to give) special relevance to the blog came about almost as a matter of chance, as so many things in life. As a grew a regular blogger I felt the need for more powerful features, but when I read Linus' Blog I suddenly realized that we had one thing in common. I quote:
"I sit in my office ... reading and writing email all day."
I also spend long hours reading and writing email, so blogger's feature of "Mail2Blogger" saved my life, or at least a lot of time. Now I do not have to sign in to fight a battle against a hideous online editor. I just have to send an email with my thoughts or my whatever you may call this and press the send button.
I used to think that the web browser was the cornerstone of a computer, but now I'm beginning to think that the mail composer is it. Well times change.
