A tour in blogger

Image from Pexels

It's been years since I started a blog which currently lives in my own server near me. I hear its fans all day long, it's litteraly near me. But with something like that comes the responsability of maintaining backend stuff to keep it running. Now, I cannot say I'm a super active content creator, but hey, sometimes there's a little desire to put something out there. So I did that.

Time passed however, technology moved forward and we have a huge number of platforms that already offer a way to build and maintain a blog. Case in question: Blogger. I remember setting this up long ago as a better alternative. Truth is, I like being behind the scenes as well. But a home server can't really compete with what's offered out there, and my free time gets shorter. Doing it all by hand is cool and fun, but tedious in the long run.



Having a home server has some benefits though, full control of the site, complete freedom to put whatever content one wants and in case of emergency, the data is literally at reach. But at the same time security can be lower than average blog site and reachability can be reduced for being an untrusted site.

So I'm considering moving to an already-consolidated platform, so I can make sure the content is kept online and working. Not that I have much of an audience anyway, but I want to keep this option. So right now I'm simply testing Blogger. You might ask "But Blogger has been here for years you silly!" and yeap, however will power changes over time and ideas too. I wanted to do it myself back then, now I changed my mind. So don't judge me.

So far Blogger provides most of the tools a typical user would require, a text editor, comment handling, tagging, page building, design tools, and being from Google allows you access stuff like analytics or AdSense. Which I don't care about at this moment, since I don't think I could actually monetize this. Writing isn't in my blood really, and I don't create enough of the stuff to actually get any serious income. Besides, I personally hate ads, and so it is my will to keep my own space ad free.

I don't have complete control over some stuff, the footer seems a bit hardcoded. I do have HTTPS now, so that's something, however I can't link my own domain to it, I mean I can, but not with HTTPS, a bummer. And I don't know if I like all this stuff be linked to my Google+ account. Never used much that thing, and I'll probably won't use it much. I do wonder if Google+ is one of those projects that ended up nowhere, like Buzz, remember that? Or Wave?

I might write a few things here and there to keep getting the feel of this. Moving however, will be sometime a bit complicated. I could move to a WordPress site though. I had to deal with that platform not too long ago, and despite its inner parts are horrendously splattered all over the place like if a bomb married spaghetti, I must say its outside is actually great and useful. I however, do not plan in any way to deal with an installation. Bad experience there. Still, the platform has years of experience above it and a huge library of plugins and gadgets, and it's quite flexible.

In the top of all that, I'm no designer, but I don't want to fall for those super-complex visual styles, and I don't see the need for such thing, a blog post is just text, and too much stuff will be distractive and unprofessional. Let's see what Blogger has to offer regarding that topic.

Time will decide what I'll end up doing. For now, I'll just fiddle with the basic settings and see what I come up with. I do need to like it in order to get motivation to keep it up.