Blog yourself silly! (blogger.com)

Member Name: bryantma

Product:	blogger.com
Date:	13/11/07 (153 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Power without the pain.

Disadvantages: Not portable to your own server, should you ever feel the need.

This is an excellent middle-ground blogging tool. Beginners can get a blog up and running using on of their predefined templates within seconds. Blog entries are easy to add, update and remove. Allowing visitors to leave comments is simple and even protecting those comments from spammers is catered for.

Blog entries can contain pictures, links and the usual text formatting with just a few button clicks. You can even download an application to make posting your entries even simpler. Text entries can even be posted via email.

RSS is fully supported and you can post your own entries back to yourself via email so that you have a backup of everything that you post. Should someone leave a comment, you'll be informed by email, should you want that.

Once you are a little more competent, you can start editing your own blog template and if you know HTML then you can add things to your hearts content. Each blog entry can also be written with raw HTML allowing you to create a really powerful blogging tool.

The template can also include script should you want to put stat counters and other such niceties into your blog.

Should you feel the need, it's also available in a range of languages now.

Of course all of this is hosted by Blogger themselves (Goolge by any other name). That has brought some impressive levels of reliability and I certainly have no complaints at all.

So right up to the point where you want to host your blog on your own server, Blogger is a great service and it's all free.

Summary: Googles blogging service. What can go wrong?