Thoughts on Blogger

I started my first blog using Blogger, way back before Google bought the place. It was a bit funky to use, back then, so I did most of my posting on my own site. But when I discovered Multiply, it was a far superior service to Blogger and it was much easier to post here than to post to my own website.

Well, with Multiply essentially shutting down, I've decided to go back and try Blogger out again. I thought I'd post my thoughts and discoveries as I go in case any of you all are interested. 

I just made a new post and was delighted that I could upload both photos and video to the post. You can also easily edit the added photos even after they've been included into your post. You can resize them with just the click of a button or move them around. Very nice. 

I also like that you can add a custom domain if you'd like. It's something that we've asked for many, many times here in Multiply-land and never gotten. 

I don't see much in the way of privacy settings, though. You can make it so that search engines can't find your blog. And you can choose not to be included in Bloggers list of bloggers. But I don't see any way to set some posts for just a certain circle of friends or anything like that. :-P 

You can include a message to people in the comment form. I assume that tells them something like, "Leave me a note!" when they go to comment on your post. Haven't tried it out yet, though. 

Commenting is a global thing - you can either turn it on for all posts or off for all posts. You can moderate or not moderate comments as you prefer. What's interesting is they also provide an option to only moderate comments after the post is 2 weeks old. So when you first post and are more likely to get a lot of feedback, there's no moderation. But once the post is a bit stale and it's possible it's hit the spammer circuit, that's when moderation kicks in.   ... nope, i take that back. now that i've got commenting turned on, it appears that i can henceforth turn commenting on or off on a per post basis. 

OK, I'm still relearning Blogger, but I'm going to post this so that people can add things that I've missed. I'll also update the post as I learn more, so don't just stick to comments but take a glance back at the original post now and then as well so see if there's anything new. 

I think Blogger will work well for me. Especially with all the new upgrades since I was here last. 

Now to figure out where to take groups....

Additions:

1 - you can set your blog to be visible to only certain email addresses. but it's an all or nothing sort of thing. either all your posts are public or all of your posts are private to these specific email addies. there's no per post settings. there's also no way to set the privacy to one of your Google+ circles. hopefully that will come because it would be much easier than the current system. 

2 - you can't upload a file (other than images) to blogger. you have to upload it to another site (like scribd.com) and then embed it.