Oddball Update

Some issues my mom was having with her blog earlier today — they’re still ongoing, actually — caused me to reflect on the pros and cons of rolling your own blog (such as Wordpress) vs. going with a free service (like Blogger). Blogger recently rewrote their core system, and there have been a lot of problems as a result. In particular, if you created a Blogger account back on their old system and then converted it to the new one, you are right now most likely dealing with a variety of cryptic and annoying errors.

It’s things like this that help highlight the pitfalls of running your blog on a blogging service, powered by another company’s servers. Still, there are advantages and disadvantages to both sides of the practice. I thought I’d run down some of them.

Blogging Services

Pros

• Usually free
• Often a high level of polish
• Maintained and kept current automatically
• Let you browse through a community of bloggers on the same system

Cons

• Often has limited customization capability
• If the core system breaks, you’re stuck until they fix it
• If it goes down, every blogger on the system is offline
• If it one day stops being free, or goes out of business, your site is toast

Rolling Your Own

Pros

• Full control
• Customize with plugins, core hacks or code changes
• More file storage space and bandwidth (depending on your web host)
• Because the system doesn’t change unless you change it, it won’t start mysteriously breaking

Cons

• Need to keep the core software updated yourself
• If you break it, you have to fix it
• May require tweaks, plugins or customizations to get the same functionality that’s included with some free blogging services

Categorized as Randomness