I get mail

Long night, folks. I just put RRND and FND to bed while simultaneously killing off a fifth of Old Crow in memory of Mistah Thompson. And now I'd like to hold forth, in somewhat wobbly fashion, on the mechanics of blogging.

I love Blogger. For my money -- of which I don't have much and of which Blogger demands precisely none -- it's still the coolest blog infrastructure provider in town. The interface is easy to use, their BlogSpot site is seldom down and if the templates aren't exactly eye-popping, they're functional.

But I get mail.

Knappster,

Get a clue. Get WordPress or Grey Matter or go to TypePad. You gotta liven this site up some.

Sincerely,
The 3L33T1STS

I dunno. I've been mucking around with web sites for more than a decade now. I can write reasonably clean HTML that gets the job done. And I tend to distrust ostentatious tech. It took a month at Betty Ford to get me past my fear of JavaScript.

My practice with Knappster has been simple: I write, and Blogger does the work. If I decide I want something a little more frilly than what they have to offer, I grab some third-party code and paste it into my template. After I've added enough geegaws, gimcracks and hangamajiggers that the page starts to look crowded, I prune. And I don't tolerate the stuff that doesn't work. A few minutes ago, I inserted -- and then deleted -- a polling script that wouldn't center and that had run-together text.

Is there some particular reason that I need all functions under one roof, so to speak? Is blogging supposed to be about writing or about having all the latest gadgetry up front? And if gadgetry is desired, is it more desirable to choose from a varied menu or to run an app that just does it all for you -- its way, not yours?

The poll I posted, then deleted, posed this question to Knappster's readers: Should I stay where I'm at, with reliable old Blogger/BlogSpot, or should I start decking this puppy out? If the latter, where do I stop? Podcasting? Flash animations? Full motion video of me dancing naked? Inquiring -- or at least inebriated -- minds want to know.

Instead of that busted-ass polling script, however, I'm just going to let the reliable old HaloScan comments script Call Forth the Voice of My People. Let'er rip.

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