Blogger Blahs

I've been thinking of making some changes in the New Year and one of them being to change blog hosts.

I like the fact that Blogger isn't blocked at my job (yet! *crosses fingers*) and that its become a popular host for a lot of Bloggers. Of course the fact its free hosting is also great. It does have pretty cool and handy side bar features but on occasion even these have mysteriously deleted itself.

Unfortunately Blogger has a lot of things I don't care for at all. Its HTML coding while writing blog posts is taking me more time to correct its everyday errors rather than me spending more time doing creative posts. Its header image upload also locks up permanently when using .gif files with more than one frame. Not to mention its occasional errors of people not being able to comment occasionally. Adding almost any animated image or normal image to a blogger post is practically a challenge as the HTML coding adds dividers/breaks/paragraphs on its own and is my biggest annoyance with the host. Not to mention its Date/Time Post Options are not always working in your favor and it decides to post in its own time frame (for me anyway).

Although HTML and web design have become 2nd nature to me for the last 13yrs I feel if it were to be more blogger layout friendly such as AOL Easy Designer or MySpace (for example) that this may also be a perk to those that aren't so savvy in that dept of customizing a layout. I've found that most of the sites outside of Blogger that offer free blogger layouts often have glitches which won't even allow their templates to work properly.

In the past I've tried such hosts as WordPress and LiveJournal (practically forgot how those ran for me back then), having a better understanding of what I'm looking for now in a blog host may help me find what I'm looking for. I'd almost take Ameblo into consideration but its more Japanese based (which I'm not so fluent and may find annoyance in it). Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated ;)

For anyone else looking into the same thing CLICK HERE, this is a link I found that tells you more about other blog hosts.