So, what is the perfect blogging tool?!

I have been blogging for a few years now. Most of that time has been spent on two blogging platforms. For the first quarter (or so) of my blogging life I used a Mac application called iBlog. It worked quite well... But, the downside was that it was an 'offline' tool. In other words, it only worked on my Mac. So, if I wasn't near that exact computer I couldn't post. The rest of my time has been spent mostly on blogger. Blogger is great for posting from all over the place (you may have noticed that I do a lot of posts from my car! Whenever I am stuck in traffic the neurons start firing and out comes my iPhone!) The downside, however, is that blogger is not all that flexible. It has clearly been written for the 'lowest common denominator'. In particular I have found that as my needs (and the traffic to my site) have grown blogger simply can't keep up (like for example having to stop using the very useful 'tags' feature because it simply would not work when I published to my own URL).

Recently I have been dabbling with Wordpress. It is a lot more flexible, and certainly seems to suit the hardcore blogger a little more.

However, there are two reasons why I have not moved across to Wordpress. First, I have almost 600 posts in blogger... I would have to move each of those 600 posts manually... Not likely. Second, Wordpress does not post to a 'private' URL as easily as blogger does... So, I have not made the move.

I would love to hear what others are using, why they use their particular platform, and if there are any suggestions...

Meanwhile, here's a post from Cory Doctrow on bloggin standards:

"Metafilter" Matt Haughey just finished migrating one of his blogs to a new back-end, and the experience has left him with a lot of smart thinking about what the perfect blogging tool should be like:

There really should be a standard of some sort that blog CMS companies can agree on for export and import. Users of blog engines shouldn’t be hostages to their applications. Data exit and entry is problematic in everything I’ve used and it’s a shame. Blogging is supposed to be fun and I prefer to be agnostic about what tools I’m using, so it’d be nice if I could change blog engines every three months without too much friction. I won’t even go into how every engine has its own URL scheme — it’d be nice if I could keep my permalinks forever, even as I change blogging apps.

Link

Comments

[Steve Hayes]

Like you, I have a Blogger blog (several, actually) and a WordPress blog, and I can't make up my mind which I prefer.

I find blogger handles a lot of things more flexibly, because it allows JavaScript, while WordPress does not - hence the mess with the pictures in the MyBlogLog widget on WordPress, which often shows the wrong pictures.

But Blogger still has bugs -- it's a mornings only tool, since if you post in the afternoon it treats it as if you posted in the morning. Thus posts often appear out of order, and aggregators like Amatomu will miss them.

So I keep using both. Blogger in the mornings and WordPress in the afternoons and evenings or when I'm making references to other WordPress blogs.

[Gus]

I use a small hosting service and redirect my url www.gruntle.co.za to my blog.

Wordpress does import bloggger posts - but I'm not sure if it'll import them from your site. see www.gruntleblog.wordpress.com