For the last year and half I have been utilizing Blogger’s free platform (free as in beer*) and at first it was nice and easy and it worked. But I have grown more and more frustrated with it over time. For the most part it’s just been minor personal annoyances.
First off, I hate the blog’s theme. Absolutely hate it. Unfortunately I hate all other themes even more. I want more options and more flexibility, even if I have to pay for it.
Secondly, I don’t know what’s going on under the hood and I am highly limited in the amount of tweaking I can do. There’s a free and open source platform available that is everything I could hope or dream of (wordpress.org). Unfortunately, it requires paying for a hosting service. My costs would go from just the $10/yr for the domain to at least $5.95/mo for hosting plus the cost of the domain. While that’s not much, it is an eight fold increase, but still a pretty damn cheap hobby.
Finally and most important, Google has announced that they will be doing local censoring. From what I’ve seen it looks like it may only effect blogs that do not have custom domains, but the details are sketchy. How it will work is that anyblog.blogspot.com would redirect to a version for the country of the person visiting the blog, so someone from Australia would be redirected to anyblog.blogspot.com.au. This will enable them to block blogs that violate local laws if someone complains.
Lots of countries like Ireland, Indonesia, and most of the Middle East have blasphemy laws which I violate on a routine basis and if I were to speak out against a British quack I would then be violating their libel laws. All it would take is one person to complain and an atheist and/or skeptic blog goes dark for an entire country. Even if it just applies to sites that utilize the blogspot.com domain, it would just be a matter of time until it extends to blogs with custom domains.
I am staunchly opposed to censorship of any kind, let alone on the internet, and I can not support a move like this, so I’m taking my blog and walking, not that Google will care or even notice.
The transition will probably take a few weeks and I’ll try to make it as seamless as possible, but as a warning, there will undoubtedly be some hickups.
*The free and open source software (FOSS) community often distinguishes the two types of free software as free as in beer and free as in freedom. When it’s free as in beer, it’s nice, it can be wonderful, but once you’ve used it, it’s gone. When it’s free as in freedom you can do with it as you please: copy it, modify it, rebrand and redistribute, you name it (as long as you follow the terms of the associated copyleft license). Blogger is free as in beer, while the wordpress.org platform is free as in beer and freedom.