Why not Blogger?

For years, I was hosting a lot of my own stuff. I learned a lot through it (back in the school days when I really had lots of time). And me, with my fancy for putting a lot of time into getting things right, am switching more and more to hosted services.

There's always some edge in hosting your own. For years, I'd swear on IMAP access and won't move to the webmails. Naturally, I had a day or two a year when I'd miss mail cause some daemon in my flaky system would go down or misconfigure. At least I never got hosed by lack of backups, but it's a well-known truth that hosted services back up better than you ever will.

Eventually, GMail had its own edge which I couldn't replicate easily with other software -- the mobile access. And you know what? I don't miss IMAP that much, and now that Gmail introduced it, I don't even use it.

By 'hosted services', I mean services hosted by others (Google, LiveJournal etc.) And I'm not deriding them; on the contrary.

I'm not recommending Blogger specifically, just saying that trying out blogging services will be a better use of your efforts than trying out web hosting + random app combinations until one finally sticks.