Last night I reviewed a few of the blogging services that I have used, offering some observations about these services. However, when it comes down to it, all of the services do pretty much the same thing — they process data (usually the written word) inserting it into a predefined template and stamp it with a date and time of posting. In essence they simple content managers, organizing information that you write for distribution on the web.
Choosing a blogging service and creating the blog is the easy thing (although I will admit that creating a good looking blog that moves beyond the stock templates is a bit more difficult). The much harder part of maintaining a blog is coming up with content to share, and formatting that content in a way that makes sense.
All of the blogging services have on-line editors on which you can write your blog “posts.” These editors are usually very simple in nature. The most basic have almost no formatting tools, while those that are more developed allow one to insert pictures, format text, and perform other basic tasks. These generally work pretty well for most things, but after a while I have found myself bristling at the limitations of these editors.
