11 March 2006

I've been using Blogger for quite a while now with no problems and excellent flexibility. Sure there are more robust applications out there (TypePad, WordPress, etc.) but for now I'm happy with the simplicity of Blogger for personal blogging and even for some side projects I have been working on.

For example, I am currently doing a website that will have four sections completely driven by Blogger. The Blogger Admin Panel serves as the Content Management System (CMS) for the pages which allows "less techie" people control over the site in a more dynamic way. The awesome thing is this: the people who will be updating these pages are already bloggers! So there is NO learning curve (how cool is that?)

All the work is in the front end - incorporating the Blogger specific tags into your existing page (similar to html tags but are dynamic to call data from the appropriate places after a post has been published). After that it's a detailed incorporation of your sites stylesheet.css and the styles from the blog template (if you're stripping down an existing one) and that's a wrap.

Blogger allows two publishing formats. The first (and easiest) is to publish all posts/images to the Blogger servers (called "blogspot"). But the second option is the one that rocks! Blogger will publish posts/images directly to your website via ftp or sftp. Simply enter the correct path(s) to the correct directory(ies) and Blogger does the rest...

What was designed for blogging can just as easily be used as a CMS!

Thanks for everything Google!