On Blog Engines

I've been using blog tools on and off for better and for worse. Every time I've tried always ends up somewhere a little past 'bad', but never enough to make me give up. As you can see, the newest contender is Blogger. Let's dig back to see what Blogger's up against.

• EDIT - back when I was on DOS, I kept a mini journal using the EDIT program and floppies for storage. I got bored of writing, and one day my floppy got corrupt.
• Xanga - A high school fad that came and went for most of my friends. I actually wrote in mine, and had a good time with it. When I found out I couldn't get all my posts back without buying a paid account, I was pissed. I used Perl and WWW::Mechanize to scrape back my posts. But it was clunky and I got sick of it.
• LiveJournal - This was supposed to be private, but I never got into it. LJ had a nice clean look. I just lacked the motivation.
• MovableType - This was hosted at OCF, a computing facility at Berkeley. I really liked how I was in control of many options as well as the database containing my actual posts. Then one day my account was disabled because I had some dead sql account password in plain text. This might've worked out, but the OCF was too flaky and poorly maintained, and I would've gave up on them at some point anyways.
• Wordpress, Mephisto, you name it - Movatype drove me to all kinds of other blog systems I would personally maintain. Most of them didn't have more than 2 posts in them before I abandoned them. Plugins were nice, but I missed the days when I just wrote in a text file...
• Markdown + Text - So I went full circle and came back to plain text. Plain text is great. It's portable, easily compressed, and easy manipulated. Combining it with Markdown made it very readable and very web compliant. Everything was looking up until the end of the summer. At that point, I started getting tired of scrolling through the long page of posts, not being able to have comments, and not being able to sort or limit the range of dates for posts. Basically, I wanted to have more feature-ful and robust blog engine again... Just without the DB. I did try Bloxom at some point, and thought it was wonderful, but didn't like how the dates were tied to the last-modified timestamp of the files.

So here I am. I came to Blogger cause my brother just started one. I'm actually excited about this one because of the external ftp publishing option that allows me to store my posts on a server that I control. I also like how it uses flat files. I like the existing user base, and the ability to comment. I like the potential future integration with Google apps. I like how the GreaseMonkey script to edit with Markdown. There's a lot to like, and no downsides other than migrating my existing posts here. This might be the system for me.

Update: Blogger is not even close to XHTML strict. Le sigh.