Moving ahead

The big story today: someone compromised Blogger's security. At the onset of the whole event, I thought my account was the only one getting hacked. Shows what an egomaniac I am.

I was relieved to discover it was a Blogger-wide problem, and not just my own problem. Knowing it was a site-level hack made it very unlikely individual blog content would be harmed. Still, to be safe, I changed the FTP password on the host, and patted myself on the back for having a mirror of everything at home (including affiliates). Still, it made me realize that if someone had compromised my Blogger account, it would be a huge headache, and one potentially for the affiliate blogs as well.

I'm a fan and supporter of Blogger, and I'm the first to say the service is far from perfect. Evan Williams has his hands full with such a highly visible central service drawing attention from every Internet hoodlum looking to make mischief. While I would have liked more news sooner about the vandalism, in the end there was little material damage to me. I think Blogger handled it fairly well.

But this recent incident contributes to my growing sense that I am outgrowing Blogger. Some other minor frustrations have been:

• The BlogSend function, which allows me to email posts to subscribers, works erratically, and lately not at all.
  
• No sign of the BlogSearch feature, which was announced as "coming soon" when BloggerPro went live. It was one of the reasons I opted to go Pro.
  
• Wireless Blogger, the only "light" means of getting posts on Blogger using a Pyra hosted tool, is broken and no longer supported.
  
• The post by email feature has never worked for me on my test blog.

Admittedly, none of these things are essential. The BlogSend feature is still in beta. Pyra never promised when the search would be ready. And Wireless Blogger was never really officially supported. Post by email has other issues, which probably would have made it useless to me, even if it did work.

Still, at this point in my blogging career I want more control. I know tinkering with the engineering of my site will take time away from my writing, and add some hours of effort needed to maintain my blog. But I am ready for that. I want that.

I still think Blogger and Blogger Pro are the easiest tools for non-technical people to get their words on the web. The time has come for me, though, to move on.

Movable Type, here I come.

It won't happen soon, but it's going to happen. If I do it right, you won't even notice. But I'll be leaving Blogger with fondness, not because I'm fed up, but because I want to do more and I am ready to do more.
posted 10:34 PM | link |