I’ve tried many of the blogging “systems” and tools that are out there…started with Blogger back in 2000, then moved on to GreyMatter, then Movable Type, and have now been with WordPress for over three years. GM and MT are great, in their own ways, but GM was a bit harder to tweak than others, and MT took *forever* to rebuild whenever you made changes. Blogger, however, I still use for some small sites that I tinker with; it’s still a great tool for quick blogging. And besides, you never quite get over your first love, right?
In between all of those, I’ve also established accounts at other hosted services in order to test drive the product: LiveJournal, GeoCities, Vox, Yahoo 360, Typepad, and most recently MySpace. The LJ community is much more “internally” focused than the blogging community at large; Vox is still too new to figure out; Yahoo 360 didn’t seem to go anywhere; TypePad is pretty cool; and MySpace - well, quite simply, I’m baffled about the success of MySpace. Almost without exception, the few MySpace sites that I’ve visited are absolutely painful to look at. The design and layout - ouch! But someone who read one of my other sites asked me if I knew how to design a background incorporating her school mascot, so I gave it a shot, and wound up using it on my own MySpace page. Anyway…it’s great that there are so many options for veteran bloggers, medium bloggers, and newbies.
So now it’s your turn: what blogging services and software have YOU used, and which do you prefer? Any strong feelings about any of them, pro or con?

UPDATE: Crap…I just noticed that THIS blog is having comment troubles, too — it says that this entry has TWO comments, but there’s really only ONE. What the heck…?

It’s true: over at my GreaterFalls.com site, the PlainTxt theme is very cool, but for some reason the comment count doesn’t want to play nicely. Comments do get added, and they show up in the “Recent Comments” section of the sidebar, but the actual comment count for the entries won’t budge. Anybody have advice on how to fix…? (more…)

After wrestling with Spam Karma over at Big Sky Blog (and having would-be commenters frustrated by “SQL barf”), and never receiving an API key to activate Akismet, I went in search of another spam-busting tool and found this nifty one: Did You Pass Math? The plug-in requires only one file and then one-click activation; it then adds a very simple math question (such as 2 + 4) to the comment form. If you enter the correct answer, your comment is posted. If you don’t answer - or answer incorrectly - your comment doesn’t get posted. And it doesn’t require any captcha-specific files or fonts! So go ahead - leave a comment here, and let’s see if you passed math class!

Finally! It looks like things are back to normal here at Better Living Thru Blogging! I got an e-mail from my buddy George in New Mexico early this morning telling me that my site had been “hacked.” Sure enough — some jackass script-kiddies managed to crack into my WordPress installation (1.5) and insert their own juvenile message. It seemed to affect only my index.html (or index.php?) file; everything underneath was working fine. But I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so when I got home from work, I did a backup of my WP (using this wonderful plugin), and then did a clean install of WordPress 2.0 — and after the usual minor annoyances of any such install, my index page was back to normal. Well, almost normal — much like Steve Austin, version 2.0 is better, stronger, faster. And as you can see, I’m now using the updated Journalized Theme (thanks Mike!). The admin interface for WP 2.0 is waaaaay mucho better than 1.5, too; it has more features, more customization, and a slicker interface. I wish that I had upgraded when 2.0 first came out, but better late than never. Very much appreciate the e-mails and text-messages that some of you sent me today asking about the site!

UPDATE: doesn’t seem to be showing up very well in Internet Explorer, but just fine in FireFox and Flock. Hm. And I noticed that the comment count under this post still shows 0 comments, even though there are now two comments. Ideas?

MORE: well, for some reason it seems to display just fine in IE now. One problem solved, one more to figure out…

LAST UPDATE: Looks like there’s a fix to the comment-count issue!

Went searching for a new Theme for my blog the other day, and wound up with the 3-column Black Letterhead, created by Hakan Aydin. You can see how it looks on my site right here; if you don’t like it, you can switch back to the standard Journalized version, or perhaps give the Bionic Jive version a spin.

I put it off for long enough…but I finally went ahead and installed a tagging plug-in: Ultimate Tag Warrior. Simple install, seems to be working OK so far. You can see my “tag cloud” over in the left sidebar; I’ve only tagged about a dozen posts so far, with more to follow. The tags for each individual post are listed at the bottom of each entry on the left side…but I haven’t yet figured out how to customize the tags with a different color or font. Ideas?

Why the switch from Movable Type to WordPress? I’ve been using WP for the Big Sky Blog since August, and been reasonably impressed with the simplicity & ease of use. Second, I really enjoy the ability to switch out stylesheets in seconds (and change back, too!). Third, the re-building on MT was really, really starting to annoy me — and kinda scare me a bit, too. With 2,000 entries and nearly 6,000 comments, it took quite a while to rebuild, and with the massive comment spam during the last two weeks, it was getting tiresome. And, my MT suffered a crash last November (which Jane was kind enough to fix), and I’d been pondering a switch since then. So, after Blogger, after GreyMatter, and after Movable Type, it’s now time to give WordPress a spin. A bit scary, but so far it’s working out quite well. I’ll keep you posted with “usability” reports and let you know what’s good/bad/ugly about WP!