If you are even slightly serious about running your own blog the last place you want to be is Google's blogger.com and yet it is by far the single most popular blogging platform currently available.

This leadership is somewhat undeserved. Blogger.com lacks a significant number of tools and features that others take for granted (trackbacks, Bayesian filtration of comments, static pages, choice of XML feed format and threaded comments to name a few) and has the reputation of holding the largest collection of spam anywhere on the Internet.


Sure it is great if you live under an oppressive government and need the freedom to speak out but in any other case with even UK£10 (about US$20) to spend you can do so much better for yourself. Even without that modest budget other free options exist and merit some investigation.

A huge problem with blogger.com (especially the hosted for free domains on blogspot.com) is the vast number of pure spam blogs that use the service.

If you want people to take your blog seriously you need to place a certain amount of distance between yourself and the spammers or this open and well known abuse could hinder your rise to fame.

Mark Cuban, owner of Ice Rocket (the blog search site) was back in 2005 seriously considering removing all blogspot.com blogs from the listings as the spam blogs were drowning out all legitimate bloggers.

The situation might be slightly better today but the feeling still remains that you put a blog on blogspot if you don't actually care about it.

What I’ve found, though, is that a large percentage (maybe up to a third) of all Blogspot blogs are spam-logs - sites created to increase the Google ranking of some other site (which is itself usually a Google-spamming site). The ultimate purpose of these spamlogs is usually to drive traffic to a commission-paying pharmacy, pr0n, or casino site. — geektronica.com

Is that the kind of company that you want to keep?

But even if Google do get around to cleaning up the service (and they are showing no real sign of doing so) another question still remains - who owns your blog?

If your blog is a business venture or for an official company blog the question to ask is: "why is your company so cheap as to not even host the blog properly?" Perhaps, people will say, neither the company nor the blogger understand blogs and blogging or maybe does not care.

This is not something you need people to be thinking.

But it is not just business bloggers that should think twice before using blogger.com - take for an example the story of Charlotte Wyatt.

Charlotte was born extremely early and had to be resuscitate several times in her first few weeks of life. She was subject to a "do not resuscitate" order and was at the centre of a prolonged legal battle to have this order lifted. Her parents maintained a blog on the subject hosted by blogspot.

Now blogger.com (the direct owners of blogspot.com) are a US based company subject to the laws of the United States of America but when the UK courts decided that this information was not in the public's best interest they ordered Blogger to take down the blog.

Blogger.com acted without hesitation or challenge.

According to savecharlotte.com the message they got looked like this:

Hello,

We’d like to inform you that we’ve received a court order regarding your
blog charlottewyatt.blogspot.com. In accordance with the court order,
we’ve been forced to remove your blog.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

The fact remains that blogger.com were under no requirement to do anything and have appealed to their own government to protect freedom of speech. However, it is expensive to consult the legal department (apparently) and require that the UK authorities justify themselves especially when the customer in question gives you no money ever.

Goodbye blog, fair well readership, TTFN search engine placement, so long, nice to know you.

You own exactly what you paid for (nothing) and must start again.

In preparing to write this article I looked at a lot of blogs and what I found was that more blogspot blogs than all other bloggers said they would not use blogger had they known when they started what they know now.

It could be argued that the unique selling point (the draw power if you like) "...of blogspot is due to unawareness. blogspot is catching people young and once you get some publicity you are left with no way back. --AjiNIMC

Once you start with Blogger you are stuck with them unless a way to move elsewhere (with your data and blog readers) can be found.

These solutions do exist but they are not well publicised nor evenly documented.

As a “Problogger” I’ve got to say that I’d NEVER set up a serious blog on a free service. Why? it’s a matter of control. If you are serious about blogging you’ll want to be sure that forever more you’ll have 100% control over your blog and will not be dependent on Google for your hosting. Every time I see a commercial or “Pro” blog launched that uses Blogger I cringe. — problogger.net

If you already run a website then surely the blog should be on that site too?

If you don't run a website and indeed have never run a website, (not even a blog) and are now starting to consider you options ask yourself these questions first:

What will I do if I want to criticise my host (Blogger or Google)?
What will happen if a government is frightened by my posts?
What would I do if I wanted to run a shop?
What does my being on a free host say about me and my blog?
What if my activities or content one day find they are not in line with a revision of the TOS?
What will I do if I need a feature and it is not there?
How can I collect statistics about my readers?
What will I do about the regular "downtime"? (for a long while now Blogger.com has suffered from regular periods of "down time" where the service becomes temporarily unavailable)
If blogspot gets blocked from the big portals how will that effect me?
Does my school, college or workplace blog blogspot.com automatically to protect it's networks?

These questions can easily be answered (or stop being a consideration at all) at any time if you control the domain and the content. When you control he data it is much harder for bad luck, a falling out or a suspect court order to shut you down.

It takes only a little extra effort to find a platform to suit you and your requirements. That effort while seeming a bit much now will be something you will be very grateful for later.

We will be the first to admit that quick blog is not for everyone but plenty of other good options do exist. NucleusCMS, Wordpress, and many more. You can try out 16 Blogs and over 50 full on content management systems at opensourcecms.com before you make up your mind.

With any of the above and from under £12 (or less) you could purchase basic hosting (on Linux with php and MySQL) and a domain name you could setup any one of the 70+ site frameworks all under your full control.

As frameworks go NucleusCMS is easy to get going and has a good strong support community for English, German and Japanese (as well as other languages to a lesser degree). It has our approval (it's what we run here).

The software you may need to upload with (an FTP program) is free too with a free and open source FTP program like FileZilla which will cost you nothing but a few minuets download (longer over a 56K connection).

The strongest reason for doing this is that having spent a little money on a domain you have a name unsullied by other people's actions and you can take data, platform, inbound links and everything else with you to another provider if things go wrong or an oppressive court action threatens to override your basic freedoms. No man in a suit can press a button and take that from you.

But if you are stuck with blogspot then all this seems a little too late.

Fortunately help is at hand and over the coming weeks we will be looking at what we can do to help you get from blogger to blogging.