On the commenting lark, my biggest individual dislike of Blogger is the very poor way it handles comments, especially the unprofessional display of comment reply pages and the lack of threading. It is possible to install Intense Debate onto a Blogger blog, which seems to deal with these issues, but I personally dislike third party services and similar, they slow down load times.

But those of you already using Blogger and wanting to make it not-awful for the rest of the blogging world to comment might want to consider it, it seems to work well, and looks a lot better than the normal Blogger commenting function. Allowing people to comment using their Twitter ID is a very nice touch.

Thanks for the plug for MyCouncillor!

although her blog looks bad

Bing bing bing. Yes, it does. A large number of politicians use blogger, frequently because they think it’s the only choice they have–I met with one MP to discuss setting up a blog and he specifically thought that he would have to have “a blogspot account” in order to have anything.

I have used Blogger, that’s been made clear. I have also used many other platforms, including both Livejournal and WordPress. I have made it clear throughout that there is nothing wrong with Blogger, but that the other two are, for most purposes, better.

Blogger can achieve anything if you set your mind to it

No, it can’t. WordPress, for example, has a much better system for keeping track of posts by seperate authors, allows for feeds for each category, has both categories and tags in a flexible manner, whereas Bloggers implementation of ‘labels’ is limited and nowhere near as flexible.

Blogger can be hacked to do a number of things that aren’t there by default, and it can be made to look good (yours has improved in appearance a lot since I last looked), but both WP and LJ are more flexible straight out of the box, and have many more features that Blogger lacks. I can’t actually think of anything Blogger can do the other two can’t, but can think of many that Blogger can’t do the other two can.

Before repeating the same, already answered, point again, have you tried either of the other two? Can you speak of all three and review each from experience as I can? Are you even prepared to acknowledge the stated weaknesses of your preferred platform as I clearly have above?

Blogger can achieve anything if you set your mind to it, other people (not you) claim that Blogger is unprofessional but look at my blog…

The main problems with self hosting are a) your web host could shut you down, as happened with Tim Ireland and Boris Johnson over the Craig Murray/Schillings thing, and b) you’re almost certainly paying for bandwidth, storage, etc–Charlotte Gore nearly got shut down for excessive bandwidth, LDV has had perpetual problems with paying the bills, etc.

If you’re going to try to make a punt at being a ‘serious’ blogger, or you need the site for professional/political reasons, I think you should self host, there are tricks to reduce load–Charlotte’s raving about Amazon’s storage facility for her images and scripts currently, saving her loads, but if you’re not doing a serious project, one of the above with regular backups is sufficient (although I prefer Dreamwidth to LJ, but it’s a premium service so only mentioned it briefly, it’s an actual fork of the LJ codebase, rather nifty).

Irfan–you can recommend Blogger, yes, but do you do so from experience with other platforms? I have used all three of the above for serious projects, and like all three, but of them, Blogger was the least flexible and most annoying. I’ve run a whole ‘newspaper’ style site with WP easily, Blogger doesn’t even have easy multi-author support.

There’s nothing wrong with Blogger for amateur pundits with a single-author blog, like yourself, but multi author blogs, or politicians wanting to be seen to be serious, probably ought to look at something better.

Google are quiet good with the hostage and since starting the blog it has probably caused me trouble for about one hour on two occasions!

So I hope I know whereof I speak.

I don’t disagree with anything Mat says up there. But there is one important point he doesn’t mention. With all three of the above options, YOU DO NOT OWN YOUR BLOG. You can be shut down with (possibly) no appeal at any moment due to cock-up or conspiracy. You probably won’t be, but you could be. As, for example, Abby Lee discovered: http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/2007/08/blocked.html. The same could happen to Iain Dale, to Paul Staines, and to most of our star Lib Dem bloggers.

So Mat’s advice is very good – but, if you find you like this blogging lark and are going to stick to it, be prepared to go it alone with something like WordPress on your own web space. Just because the big names haven’t doesn’t mean they shouldn’t.