As a New Year's resolution, I decided to finally create a blog. No better time than the first day of the year! That led to deciding which blogging system to use:
After reading up a bit, I think installing the WordPress software onto your own domain seems to be the best system, but I didn't feel like going through those extra steps right now. I just wanted something quick.
After Googling a bit on the pros and cons of all the above choices, I tried out the hosted Blogger, LiveJournal and WordPress versions a bit over the past few days, and I decided to settle on Blogger for now.
There were many more built-in templates to choose from on LiveJournal as compared to Blogger or WordPress, especially if you pay a bit extra ($20/year) for a LiveJournal "Paid" account. But for most of the templates there, you can't easily override individual portions of the template. On Blogger, everything is editable if you choose to hack the template itself.
I finally settled on a Blogger template that I felt matched my aesthetics for readability and minimalism. I'm still messing around with getting the custom header image to show up exactly right, though.
I also liked the "LJ-cut" facility on LiveJournal that easily allows you to hide sections of a long post with a "Read more..." style link that expands the article when you click on it. I've been influenced by fivethirtyeight.com I guess. Luckily, I found a webpage that describes how to set up the same functionality in Blogger.
Blogger has a lot of widgets you can easily add to your site, though. And of course since it is ran by Google, it is easy to get stats and add context-sensitive ads later, if I ever decide to go that far.
I'm going to mess around with Blogger and LiveJournal a bit more, and perhaps someday I'll move over to an installed WordPress configuration. But at least I'm up and running for now.
So there you have it.
My first blog post.
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