Edit (December 2008): Clearly Fog of Eternity now uses Wordpress and not Blogger. This is not to say that Blogger is a bad tool, however, and the comments here are still relevant for some.
I always find it amusing that the Internet can provoke such heated and person discussions about the relative merits of various bits of software or hardware. One such argument is the Blogger vs Wordpress debate. These are the dominant blogging platforms on the web, and it often appears that most “hardcore” bloggers keep loyalty to Wordpress with Blogger being seen as the choice for the non-technical “average” blog-writer.
For the purposes of this website, with the blog being an integral part but not the complete focus, I currently prefer to use Blogger. Wordpress is a self-hosted blogging tool, requiring a web host with certain requirements (which in the case of the need for MySQL databases will usually mean a slightly higher cost) and the installation of various scripting. It’s customisable and has a wider scope – it’s far more practical to make a magazine-style website using only Wordpress – but for the purposes of tying a blog into the style of this site I feel that it provides a lot of unnecessary functionality and that Blogger works fine in terms of integrating into my design.
Blogger is owned by Google and is certainly more instantly accessible and user friendly. But it provides wider functionality than I think is often understood. Most specifically I think it provides very strong options for styling a blog using existing site css, and incorporating that blog into the site. I host my blog here at Fog of Eternity, using Blogger’s posting portal and their FTP service to upload the files to my server. As you can see, the blog and its style is completely incorporated into the overall design and css of the site. It does take some tweaking to do this and isn’t something that’s really convenient for the novice, but I’m happy with the end result I’ve achieved.
There are a few flaws of course. One of the more annoying is the inability of the blog to use the site’s template master page for it’s styling. The main “current blog” works fine, but the archive and tagged sections often miss bits and pieces of styling. It’s not a major issue – the Blogger template that I’ve developed is almost identical to the overall site template, the only real difference being a greater use of absolute rather than relative file paths – i.e. using www.fogofeternity.com/styles/global.css rather than styles/global.css – which ensures that parts of the styling are not overlooked when the tagged posts are uploaded into the “Labels” folder on the site.
Perhaps a more serious issue is the overall accessibility of the posts generated by Blogger. If you validate the HTML of the page under accessibility guidelines you notice a significant number of errors from Blogger generated HTML. In purely practical terms I don’t believe this has a huge impact on the actual site accessibility though. The issues are generally with the link code for comments and labels and don’t impact the reader in any significant way. But given the common use of W3’s HTML automatic validator as the standard way of testing code validity, it’s obviously less than perfect.
Overall though I’m satisfied with Blogger’s functionality and ease-of-use in terms of integration into the overall web design of this site. With Bloggers much improved labelling/tagging system and archiving it’s a fully functional and searchable blog, and given the Blogger link with Google there are also advantages in terms of speed of inclusion and update on the Google search engine. While far from perfect the ability to design my template exactly as I wish and the practical (if not validated) accessibility means that it works well for the purposes I need.