Norman blogs about how he chose what blog service to use. His criteria were: 1) ease of use and 2) look of the final product. (Of course, look of the final product was important to Norman – he’s in marketing!) As a developer and architect, I originally cared most about “rolling my own”, though I switched over to dasBlog about a year ago. (I just don’t have the time to roll-my-own as often as I used to.) However, given that I had invested significant effort into the look of my final product, that factor was important to me as well, which is one of the reasons I chose dasBlog over .TEXT.
Of course, what’s funny about investing so much time thinking about the blog template is that I think most people read the site via RSS, not HTML. Chris Anderson of “The Long Tail” wrote about this a while back. Maybe I should invest a little effort into the new dasBlog Community Edition effort – I’d like to see the number of times the RSS feed is downloaded vs. the number of times the home page is downloaded.
Norman further goes on to discuss the fact that his blog is hosted on Blogger, which of course is now owned by Google. I like his point that “Interoperability and mixed environments is the way the world works. If it is good enough for my customers, it is good enough for me.”