I got a call today from a Realtor who was interested in a template design for Blogger. He had seen this website and saw I used Blogger, and was interested in some of the features I have on this site. That got me thinking why I use a blogging tool vs. say creating my own content management back end. In this post, I’m going to look at the positives and negatives of using Blogger vs. building something similar but more customized from scratch.

Positives

1) It’s convenient. I use the Google Toolbar, which has a BlogThis link to Blogger.com. If I come across something interesting, I hit that button, and immediately am taken to a new post screen in my Blog. Granted, if I were to use a content management system, the process would be similar – I’d still go to a website, log in, fill out my post form and hit submit. Another benefit is that Blogger is free, fairly easy to set up, and has a support staff on hand.

2) Syndication! Blogger already allows for syndication through Atom, meaning that anyone with a newsreader can sign up to read my blog without visiting my website. Therefore, it’s a convenient way for readers to keep up to date on my posts.

3) When I look over my site logs, more bots seem to hit my page when I update my blog. While Googlebot still doesn’t seem connected with Blogger postings, there is a chance that sometime in the future. it might. Google owns Blogger, and while there currently doesn’t seem to be much relation between the search and blog capabilities, it’s possible that in the future, there might be. However, there are other bots and crawlers that do seem to coincide with blogging activity. MSNbot may be one of them (though it’s difficult to tell – MSNbot seems faster at indexing my pages than Yahoo’s Slurp or Googlebot, and it seems as if activity coincides with blogging activity).

4) Greater exposure – this is similar to syndication in that because I’m a member of Blogger and listed in the directory, I have another means of advertising my blog for free. It also automatically notifies weblogs.com that I’ve posted something new.

Negatives

1) The tool I use, Blogger.com, currently does not allow its users to create categories for posts. However, I felt strongly that for this website to be usable, I had to give visitors a navigational structure that would allow them to navigate through past posts to content that would be relevant to them. Therefore, I created a separate database and for each post I make, I enter a separate entry into my database to catalog the posts. Some blog tools, such as MoveableType, do provide category options, which I think is an extremely useful feature.

2) Using a blog tool makes your website difficult to customize if you have a specific method by which you’d like to lay out the data. Most websites that publish articles keep a backend database that stores all content. The site is then free to pull content from that database and display it however they choose. With a blogging tool like Blogger, that information is simply posted to your website. Blogger maintains all articles on their site and simply posts the content to yours in html format. As far as I can tell, I don’t have access to that backend database other than through their web interface.

3) Integrating Blogger into your website can be a challenge. Blogger provides standard templates that anyone who wants to start a Blog can simply select and immediately have something up and running – no design needed. If you already have a website, they allow you to code templates for both posts and archives that will integrate into your site. This doesn’t become a problem until you try out their newest feature – that each post gets its own page. Unfortunately, they don’t give you the option of coding a template for these post pages, which are automatically posted to a folder structure in the format of year/month/filename. This is problematic because I have numerous images and site links embedded in my page. Because of the way Blogger currently archives these posts, my links and images don’t work without some serious recoding of the site structure.

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