I’ve played with several blogging services over the years. I still want to play with Moveable Type, but for now I’ll stick with Typepad.
I started with Blogger, which overall was pretty good, but when I got frustrated with it’s limitations I decided to look around. In hindsight, Blogger was probably the second-most flexible of the four I tried. service.
Pros
- Overall, feature-rich and pretty easy to use
- You can easily ftp your entire site to your domain.
Cons
- Kind of a pain to customize templates, but there are quite a few sites out there with custom templates available for free
- No categories
- No
- non-blog pages
I tried the hosted service first, then decided I wanted to run it on my own domain. They have a service where they’ll install it for you.
Pros
- Open source
- Feature-rich
- Robust support for categories
- Tons of third-party themes available
- Very Customizable
- Good knowledge base
Cons
- Customizable, yes, but you really need to know some php and css to work with the themes
- Stats packages (and other goodies) were a pain to install when running on my server
I really thought this would be it for me. They take a modular approach to template-building, and pretty much let you design your own pages. Squarespace might get there one day, but they’re not quite ready for prime time yet.
Pros
- Customizing templates is relatively easy
- Great stats
Cons
- Have to redirect DNS to run on your own domain
- No support for basic add-ons (such as Feedburner) Update: I was wrong – they do indeed support Feedburner
- Ugly standard templates, not much else out there yet.
TypePad
All along, my friend Susan had been telling me to try typepad. I kept resisting, knowing I’d either have to either redirect my dns or live with a typepad.com domain. I decided on the latter. If this blog takes off, I’ll do what it takes to move it.
Pros
- Simple, flexible customization
- Supported by lots of 3rd party products
- Good knowledge base
Cons
- Minimal stats
- Have to redirect DNS to use your own domain
- Very few 3rd party templates out there, but the standards on the site are decent.
So far, overall, I’m pretty happy with TypePad. I’m having a little trouble getting some custom code to work correctly, but I’m getting there.
