I’ve been chatting with Chris a bit over email about Blogger vs. Typepad. He presents some compelling reasons for switching over to Typepad. He made the switch after using blogger for what looks like a few weeks. I created a trial account (on top of the guest account I have for soundbytes) and everything looks pretty solid. The biggest thing for me is the ability to hide the blog behind a domain. So I can setup DNS to serve happyinwater.typepad.com as happyinwater.com. I’m close to making the jump.

The only down side is I really like the blogger template I am using. They did a really nice job with it. Stupid look and feel. I spent some time trying to approximate it in Typepad to no avail. It appears as if I sign up for a “pro” account I can edit the template directly.

I’m still kind of torn between just hosting something myself and using one of the online services. It feels like the online services might continue to add additional features in a way that a self install can’t. At the same time a hosted install has some pretty compelling benefits and a lot of flexibility. I like the control.

As if hearing me ponder Jeremy posted a bit on MT and Wordpress and divides the solutions out there into two main categories: hosting services that offer blogging capabilities and “host it yourself” software. When I filter through Jeremy’s comments and trackback I am surprised that people seem to differentiate a solution on whether you have the “mad skills” (to quote Napoleon) to wrestle with coding and mark up. To me it is less of a decision of whether you can do it and more of a decision of whether that is where you want to spend your time. All of that comes down to one simple point — a blog hosting service will maintain and upgrade the product for me. That might be enough for me to stop considering this “host it yourself” solution.

Here are some of the things I have gleamed from looking around:

1. Wordpress seems to be pressing MT for the “host it yourself” market.
2. People love Flickr
3. People are bitter about MT not being open source
4. There is a crap load of blog software
5. People really love Flickr
6. Yahoo 360 might be interesting
7. My wife thinks I’m totally insane for dorking around with this stuff