While working on my new wizard theme, I was increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress Blogger made in term of features. Granted they do add features and made progress on improving the system, but they are just too slow compared to the others. If you look at their blog post for the last 4 months, they did 4 bug fixes, add the feature of scheduling future posts, support for embedding Google Docs, a blogroll list, and restore the accounts that were mistakenly marked spam! Out of all these, two features are ones that people would expect from the beginning for a modern blogging platform, not finally arrived after 5 or 6 years, one is actually just corporate integration since they belongs to Google, and one shouldn’t have happened at all!

I haven’t mention they have yet to have some most fundamental basics features like calendar archive and tag cloud!!! You get still get these features on your blog, just by DIY hacks. I have to praise Blogger for being open enough to have an html code editor that really let you put anything in it all you want, you can hack it anyway you want. But my take is that this openness still doesn’t excuse them to not have some basic features in place for people to use. Not everyone is a code monkey! I have a lot of hacks in place and while I was working on my new theme, most often than not I forgot what I did with a certain hacks and screw things up a bit. I was just completely annoyed by it.

Add to my frustration was the prospect of mobile blogging on iPhone. While the two other famous blogging platforms Typepad and WordPress both launched apps on the iPhone for blogging on the go. Despite those apps shortcoming – and I am sure they will get improved as times goes by, at least they have the apps on the App Store~ Blogger hasn’t even mention any plans let alone have an app! I always stick with Blogger because I am lazy and also want it all, I want fully-featured and yet open at the same time. (not to mention free!) There is just no such platform existed, you can usually get one or the other, not everything I wished for. So I just stay with Blogger because there wasn’t a choice I like. But I think the frustration level has been building long enough that now I am actively exploring other options.

Related posts:

1. A Possible Transition
2. Is it time to update the look of the blog?
3. My thoughts on Blogger beta
4. Twitter vs. Blogger
5. Site News: NEW LOOK!

Tagged: Blogger · Blogging