As any reader can probably tell, I am writing this on the Blogger platform, which is currently owned by Google. My presence here is an experiment after a having hosted an unloved Wordpress blog (whose URL will eventually be redirected). I want to see where the blogger platform is at, and more importantly, how it might take a few options out of my hands and allow me to focus on feeding this blog content.
What are my first impressions? Firstly from visual perspective I am happy given my expectations. I have been reading a lot of Google blogs lately which - being hosted on Blogger - let me to believe the range of Blogger's expressiveness was pretty limited. It actually is quite limited but I was expecting worse. Your allowed to pick a theme and then customise the colour and the layout of the page.
On first brush there appears a large amount of flexibility on the components you can place on your blog as well. Blogger supports Google Gadgets (which work on iGoogle as well) so there are many potential ready-made add-ons you can choose from. Possible too much, given the trouble I have just had finding a working twitter component!
TODO: Investigate Google Gadgets! I figure if in the course of posting a blog entry I think about doing something I may as well note it inline :)
Being an avid Google Reader user I thought to add a component to the side bar to show some feeds I currently have starred (a convention I use to signal to myself that I want to make a followup action). It is interesting that I did not find out how to do this from within Blogger, but within Reader. You can imagine that this decentralisation of some of the (potential) Blogger features might effectively conceal them from inidividual users for a while - Lucky I found it!
TODO: Blog how I added the starred feeds.
Using the blog itself for posting is very simple, as you might expect. As I type this I am not being overwhelmed with options about how this post should look and how it should behave. Rightly so I think. The concept of operating blogs should not be hugely complicated.
That covers off some of my initial comments. Overall Blogger looks like a simple blogging tool. It is not as pretty as some other platforms (such as SquareSpace or Wordpress.org) but with some effort could be reasonably flexible. Being free is also a bonus.
That is it. I will add additional comments about the Blogger platform when they occur to me. Stay tuned.
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