Okay, so I’m happy to admit that I’m new to this blogging malarkey. What’s a would-be blogger to do? Sign up with a blogging site, or go it alone.

Signing up with a site has obvious advantages:

• Someone else gets the hassle of configuring and maintaining the server
• Hopefully a little free advertising for your new blog on their own listings

But you have to weigh that up against the one glaring disadvantage:

• You have no control over the features and functionality of the blogging software

This isn’t an issue at all if the blogging software fulfils all your requirements, but my cursory look around at several hosts indicates that they don’t. I ruled out several for just looking plain ugly (which is a realtively minor thing in terms of functionality, but has a huge bearing on the perception of the blog to a less technically minded audience).

Eventually I decided to give blogger a try. Their site looked good, and the blog templates were equally easy on the eye. They are owned by google, who generally seem to be about as good as a large megacorporation can get (and have a company motto of “Do no evil”, which is a pretty good start), so I held out high hopes for the blogging software.

Unfortunately there’s no way to try their blogging software other than by starting a blog. Okay, it’s free, so I gave it a go. After dealing with the hurdles of actually creating an account (more on that in a later post), I found that the one piece of functionality I really wanted to have – the ability to categorise the blog entries – was missing entirely.

So I’ve given up on blogger, and instead I’ve installed WordPress on one of the websites I manage. This has the option of categories and subcategories galore, is written in PHP (which is a language I’ve used quite extensively, so I can hack the code a bit, should I find that I need to), and was a very simple and straightforward install (it’s one of the things the developers appear to pride themselves on).

So this will be both my last full post on blogger, and my first real post using WordPress. I may delete the blogger account at some point, or I might leave it languishing in case I ever do have a use for it. But for the time being my new WordPress powered blog is here