Blogger has gone to seed. I was doing some coding work last night on a little project in both Blogger and WordPress, and the differences were very noticeable. For one, the Blogger servers were being just rubbish, and sometimes I couldn’t log in. I was told at one point I had JavaScript disabled, and then a quick refresh proved I didn’t.
These sorts of problems are not frequent really, but happen every month or two. And do seem to be down to volume. Google just don’t seem to be expanding the service at all.
And that goes for technical development as well. Have a look at WordPress sometime. Categories for posts. A much clearer interface for editing your template, rather than one huge single text file. Plugins. A sidebar widget that is being developed at the moment, to make editing this important area of blogging real-estate much easier.
Then come back to Blogger, and realise that you are not only missing these, but that there is nothing that has been added for well over a year. Just stagnation. Oh alright, we got a few new templates, but that was it. I want all the above things, and more, I want a WYSIWYG template editor, made in lovely swishy AJAX, I want lots of integration with the other Google services. Show the public events on my Google calendar? Yes please. Lots of potential there, but it just isn’t being realised. I’d even pay for it, I’d have a pro account if it meant I got better service and features. However I just don’t see any progress coming at the moment, so I am probably moving this to WordPress in the next few months.